Sketch Club 6/25

Here are a couple of pieces from last Friday's Sketch Club. I tried out some watercolor on very toothy hand-made paper. While I'm not crazy happy with the results, it was still a fun experiment and I hope to play around with it again in the near future.

The Nabbit Frog

I was recently asked to design a new "spokesphibian" for a company called Nabbit. It's a neat, FREE service that allows you to "Nabb" a song's title and artist while you're listening to the radio. You can do this by a variety of means: texting, mobile web browser, and even a free iPhone app.

Anyway, here is what we came up with. He is hot off the press with the digital paint drying just about two weeks ago. That is quite a difference from working on a movie - usually a year or more passes from my work and the final product being released.

The Daily Zoo at Bethesda Hospital, MN

For anyone in the Twin Cities metro area of Minnesota, I just wanted to let you know that an exhibit of Daily Zoo prints from the first two books is on display at Bethesda Hospital in St. Paul, where I did a drawing workshop with some of the brain trauma patients and a book signing this past April. The show went up at the beginning of June and will come down at the end of July. Initially there were 60 images on display, but some have been sold and taken down already. The exhibit is in The Cafeteria Gallery, so if you're in the area why not stop over for a bite and some art? (I can attest that the food is pretty good there.)



While preparing the images for exhibit, I found myself continuing to tinker with some of them (the curse of the artist I guess - a piece is never truly "finished"). Here are a few examples of some of the tweaked pieces. They differ from the versions that appear in the books mainly by the replacement of the tan paper backgrounds with the new colored versions seen here. Incidentally, the Content Kitty print (shown at bottom) has been a popular one at some recent charity auctions and has done well in raising funds for some great causes such as the National Bone Marrow Registry, Alcott Center for Mental Health Services, and the Minnesota Angel Foundation (helping children who have parents facing cancer). Fundraising auctions are a common event for many charities, so to all of you artists out there please consider donating a bit of your time and talent to help out a cause that is important to you.