Athletic Illustration
This time, a collection of Athletic Illustration. It’s fun to take a great action photo and transform it into a dynamic piece of art! I started doing sports illustrations while at my full-time position at The Wall Street Journal. Here’s a weightlifter that was published in the WSJ…
Pumping Iron
At The Journal, we were constricted by column-width. I was stuck within the full-column format, seen above, but was free to ‘break the box’ as I did here on top of the frame. Notice my small signature, bottom-left. I put my name on the more successful illustrations.
Miguel Cabrera
ESPN magazine gave me the assignment to create an image of Detroit Tiger slugger Miguel Cabrera. A dramatic, athletic pose!
Mikkel Hansen
Even more exciting was this illustration I created for Euroman, a Danish monthly men's lifestyle and fashion magazine headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark. This is Mikkel Hansen, playing for Football Club Barcelona.
Janik Hansen
The image above was also for Euroman. The two illustrations ran as full-page graphics. I even drew an extra ‘tip’ of Janik’s hockey stick, which bled onto the facing page. Here, he’s playing for the Vancouver Canucks.
Martina Navratilova
The above graphic ran in Time magazine, International Edition. A challenging illustration with lots of intricacy.
Special Olympics
This drawing was created for the Philatelic (Stamp Collecting) Department at The Reader’s Digest. It shows the founder of Special Olympics, Eunice Mary Kennedy Shriver, pinning a medal on a contestant. This illustration likely was printed at 2-¼” wide. At that size, it would resemble a fine engraving. The image was printed on an envelope containing a postmarked stamp, indicating the ‘First Day of Issue’ for that stamp. People collected these.
Tiger Woods
I sometimes get hired to replicate currency. Sports Illustrated gave me the task of placiving the visage of Tiger Woods on a ‘Zillion-Dollar’ bill! Here is how it looked in print:
Sports Illustrated, Full-page currency Illustration
To finish, an illustration I created for a Ferrar, Strauss, and Giroux book cover, only a few of months ago. Art Director, Rodrigo Corral… It takes us all the way back to the Dawn of Sport. An ancient runner from Greece!
