Mark Schultz Various Drawings Volume 5

Various Drawings Volume 5: front and back cover and flaps

Here's the new cover to Mark Schultz Various Drawings book. It's hard to believe, that we are on Volume 5 already. Because Mark was so busy with so many projects last year, there wasn't time to do a collection of his artwork. This should be a pleasant sight to the fan's of Mark's work. This, like all of the other volumes, will contain stunning illustrations that Mark has worked on over the last 2 years. Of course, included, will be a beautiful gatefold rendering.

I could go through an explanation of the process of creating this cover, but John Fleskes has already done that for me, so I won't post it here, as that would be redundant. So scoot over to John's blog at Flesk Publications, for a detailed description of the creation of this cover.

Johnny Comet Deluxe

Front and back cover to the Johnny Comet Deluxe Hardcover

This is the third cover I did for Johnny Comet. I actually started out doing this cover for fun, (I know it sounds weird, as if I don't have enough to do). I wanted to create or explore the idea of using Johnny Comet imagery, and turning it into a movie style poster. For some reason I hadn't had enough of Johnny Comet yet. After a year of working on the book, you would think I would want to move on...sigh. There is just so much great art in the Johnny Comet series, I wanted to see if I could produce one more fresh look on it. The fun part is, I get to play with Frank Frazetta's toys.

Shortly after I got done playing with this, and trying to figure out now what to do with it, I received a call from J. David Spurlock. David is the publisher of Vanguard Productions books. He had decided after we had finished up the soft and hard cover versions of the Johnny Comet book, that he would like to do a third very special version. This third book would be a Deluxe Edition with 16 additional pages containing original Frazetta artwork along with a slipcase. He wanted to convert the original Hardcover artwork into the slipcased version. Do you really think it was a coincidence that just that day, I had finished up my experimental cover? Well, I showed it to David, and it really didn't take too much persuading for him to decide to use the "movie poster" version for the Deluxe Edition. I'm glad it worked out, I have a feeling the movie poster idea might end up being used again...stay tuned!

Frank Frazetta's White Indian

Front and back cover of the White Indian softcover

Here's another cover, in the ongoing library for Vanguard Productions, of Frank Frazetta's comic work. I just finished up this project along with the 3 versions of the Johnny Comet book. It's nice to finally have all these stories collected in both softcover, hardcover and Deluxe Editions in slipcases. I believe these will be considered the definitive collections. Everyone who knows the history of comic books and storytelling arts, knows the impact that Frank Frazetta has had on that industry. He remains, possibly, the most influential artist of all time.

With this cover, I'm trying to continue on stylistically, with the same template that was created for the Johnny Comet book. I like the idea of having a collection or library of books that have a similar theme or style when sitting on your shelf. It's part of the challenge of design, to create a family of books, that somehow share the same genetic traits. I think people that have a collector's mentality would appreciate that.

Baseball Gala

Large Sign for bar area

Large Glass Display Case

Large Sign for bar area

Event Program Cover

Here's the first post of 2011! My intentions were always good when attempting to keep an updated blog, I don't know what happened, but time flew by. This is a project that I completed recently, for a company that was having a large gathering at Minute Maid Park in Houston. The theme revolved around the golden age of baseball, and the Boston Red Sox. What an absolute delight this job was. I really had no idea what to expect in the beginning, but when the art director started laying it out for me, I got very excited.

The company was renting out the mezzanine area inside of the Houston Astros stadium. They wanted to transform it into a party atmosphere, with several oversized banners, signs, showcase displays, pennants and cut-outs of players. Wow...seriously? I couldn't wait to begin. A lot of the graphics and colors felt kind of like a "no-brainer." The red, white and blue, went through the aging machine to give the right flavor for the palette. I used reference photos of 40's — 50's era players (Ted Williams!), and tried to use type fonts that would reflect that time period. The glass display case measures 80" x 33" with the center glass panel being 80" x 54". There are 4 separate banners that hang from quite a ways up, that measure 15' x 3'. The cut-outs of players are close to actual size. So, you can see the artwork is really large. I also did 2 different versions of a group of players sitting on 2 different benches. I think in all, there were close to 30 different designed pieces. It was very time consuming and challenging, but extremely enjoyable.