Caricatures

Caricatures are a playful way to commemorate people's lives, relationships, careers, accomplishments, passions, and personalities.  These carefully rendered illustration projects make great gifts... and might I suggest would serve as fun avatars, educational or editorial art. ;-)

The Three Amigos
These men were a trio of close dear friends, in a friendship spanning many decades, filled with humour and fun.  This caricature was commissioned by Margaret Smith, the daughter of the fellow on the far left, as a commemoration on the occasion of his funeral.  What a fun and joyful way to celebrate the lives of these three wonderful men!

Margaret had a big batch of these printed up at 11x14" (A standard size for store-bought frames) to give away to the relatives of the guys.

It's one thing for me to look at some photos and make a likeness, but Margaret has a lifetime of impressions of her father that a few photos simply can't capture.  So Margaret and I worked back and forth to get her dad's appearance just right and she was super happy with the result... which makes me super happy too!

I asked Margaret If I could use her emailed words about it as a testimonial and she replied with "Absolutely !!!"  So here are those words, collected from the last few emails between us: "I am very excited!!!"  "That (caricature) is wonderful, thank you so much." and "I couldn't be happier.  Thank you so much for all your effort." and then the topper...

Hi Scott just wanted to let you know that your caricature was a huge hit.  All were thrilled and said it would be framed and hang in their homes.  You certainly told their story well.  Thank you again
– Margaret Smith 

Glencoe

Here is a sample of one I did years ago.  This is before I was working digitally and I didn't properly document or store the final inked version before giving it to the client. This is the tight pencil sketch, to show you how you can bring elements of stories from their lives into the image.  She was a musician who'd met René Levesque and had an incident with a hot poker.  He had shot a cobra in India in the '40s with a Sten gun during his military service and drove a motorcycle to Glencoe in Scotland.  This was for their 50th anniversary.

Honduras

The Wedding Gift

Historical Figure

For a comic book project, Charles de Salaberry was instrumental in Canada's successful defence of the American Invasion of 1812.  I drew this in 2012.

Three Amigos Caricature

Nope, not  Martin Short, Steve Martin and Chevy Chase.  This "Three Amigos" is a trio of close dear friends, in a friendship spanning many decades, filled with humour and fun.  This caricature was commissioned by Margaret Smith, the daughter of the fellow on the far left, as a commemoration on the occasion of his funeral.  What a fun and joyful way to celebrate the lives of these three wonderful men!
She had a big batch of these printed up at 11x14" (A standard size for store-bought frames) to give away to the friends and family.

It's one thing for me to look at some photos and make a likeness, but Margaret has a lifetime of impressions of her father that a few photos simply can't capture.  So Margaret and I worked back and forth to get her dad's appearance just right and she was super happy with the result... which makes me super happy too!

I asked Margaret If I could use her emailed words about it as a testimonial and she replied with "Absolutely !!!"  So here are those words, collected from the last few emails between us: "I am very excited!!!"  "That (caricature) is wonderful, thank you so much." and "I couldn't be happier.  Thank you so much for all your effort."  And to top it all off...

Hi Scott just wanted to let you know that your caricature was a huge hit.  All were thrilled and said it would be framed and hang in their homes.  You certainly told their story well.  Thank you again
– Margaret Smith 

"Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) for Kids" Comic

I've created this one-page comic to help anybody enhance their use of EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques).  I invite individuals and EFT practitioners alike to share and use this tool for free forever.

Several years ago I created a comic like this for adults.  Then recently an EFT practitioner named Tony Macelli, based in Malta, contacted me asking for permission to modify it for use with younger children. Tony felt the cartoon format would help the child relate more to the information.  

One thing led to another and we ended up collaborating to design this new version. I did all the artwork and the layout is almost identical to my old one.  Tony rewrote my words to be more kid friendly and suggested the thermometer element so kids could point with their finger to rate the level of their upset feelings without necessarily needing to know numbers or to speak aloud if they were feeling reluctant to speak.  

If you read the fine print at the bottom you'll see the comic is free for anyone to distribute, publish, host, photocopy, and share in whatever way, forever without limit.  My hope is that people will find this very useful and share it freely to help each other heal and grow.  If you need a higher resolution version of this for publication you can email me to request it, or google around for it and hopefully some other people will be hosting it somewhere that you can download the high resolution PDF.  At some point I'll figure out how to put a download link here in the blog.

Black and white is better for photocopying... especially if there will be photocopying of the photocopies.

Foldigo Cover Re-Do

After 6 hours redesigning the cover for Livingston issue 1 I look at both versions side by side and wonder why I insisted on creating a completely new illustration.  The old cover was too busy at the top, the titles were too hard to read, and Franchesca's  house doesn't' match the pop-up version I created for the craft kit.  The new cover has more free space at the top and simpler letters, and we get to see Livingston's excited face. So I think the new cover is a better solution.

Actually, The purple wasn't working for me.  She's supposed to be in the shade of her front porch, not a grape Kool-aid ice sculpture :-)  

M in the Abstract

My friend Douglas Davey recently launched his great new young adult book, "M in the Abstract" about a struggling teen who seems to have a particular ability.  Not only is he a writer and an avid consumer of story, Douglas is a parent, a teacher, a librarian, and so has a particular insight into the minds and culture of young people that I seem to have forgotten (my teen years being more than half my life ago), until reading this book.    Really touching, beautifully written.  This is my reinterpretive doodle inspired by the cover of the book.  It's a great read even if you're no longer a teenager.  I recommend it.

Foldigo Issue 3 Is In The Can!

... in the film making sense... nothing to do with the bathroom... although that is where I get some of my best creative ideas.

Here's a sneak peek at issue 3... my favorite most exciting foldigo cover art yet.  There's a real trick to making cover art, I'm finding.  If you can believe it after all these years of making comics I've rarely designed a cover.  I'm always drawing interior story art or making coverless short stories.  Anyway, I'm starting to get the hang of it, I think.  Keep it simple, make it pop, don't clutter up the top quarter where the titles need to go, use imagery that grabs people's attention.  Now I want to go back and redesign the cover for issue #1 with these principles in mind.  Hmmm...

Doesn't this make you want to click over to www.foldigo.com and buy a subscription to Livingston and Friends?  Only $11.95 and you get short comics and a bunch of paper crafts to go with the story.  But wait!  There's more! :-P  There's also a bunch of free downloadable paper crafts too. Cool, right? :-)  Check it out.

Foldigo Comics and Toys, First Issue Launched!

I'm part of a really cool startup called Foldigo. We create foldable toys and stories delivered to you by good ol' fashioned snail mail.  The kids at the test session had a great time folding up their foldable characters, and now the comic is complete. The first issue of our first available subscription is now available!  We have a facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/Foldigo) with updates and photos of the toys and if you Like the page you'll be kept in the loop of how things are developing.

I had a lot of fun creating the story, with a fun cast of characters and a positive message... I even snuck in a little math lesson into one of the gags... I'm tricky that way :-).  Here's what the comic cover looks like:

Trains

A new subject matter for me... Trains.  Another fun project for UpHere Business Magazine.

Frozen Globes

This got me one of my favorite client responses ever.  Says editor, Guy Quenneville upon receiving final art, "WOW - HOLY CRAP. That's stunning."  Have I mentioned I love working with these guys?  This was art directed by Mike Ericsson, who also art directed the Supergiants illustration (scroll down to June 2011 here in the blog to see it).

UpHere Business Magazine is starting an annual awards ceremony to recognize successful businesses and entrepreneurs in Northern Canada.  The awards are called the Frozen Globes.  They asked me to design an illustration to promote this.  I figured it should look like something that could be turned into an actual award trophy so, to give them the option, the glacial lettering is designed to be isolatable as a pedestal to hold the icy globe above.  I imagine the whole thing made out of coloured glass, maybe with a little LED light inside, and a Star Wars style hologram making the Northern lights shimmer above it.

UpHere Business Magazine Gig

Got another fun job with UpHere Business last month (http://www.uphere.ca/).  For an article about Nasa's recent discovery of a planet 5 times the mass of Earth and 1/3 composed of diamonds.  In a comic book universe this would pose a serious threat to the diamond industry in the Northwest Territories.  Premier of NWT Bob McLeod depicted as a superhero come to save the industry.  Special thanks to Guy Quenneville and the other editors at UpHere for choosing me for the gig and being such great collaborators.

There is a Dog

@ronmarz has a picture of his dog as his twitter icon.  His dog looks nothing like this and it's head is actually turned in profile to the right, but at the small avatar size, this is the dog my brain sees... even though I know better having already seen at a slightly larger size it's clearly a completely different image. I'm always fascinated by the flexibility of perception. It constantly reminds me that reality is open to interpretation, subject to the resolution and expectations of my own imperfect perception. This is a good thing to know so that I can correct myself when a new more appropriate idea or model of perception comes along without being too overly attached to my old ideas and paradigms.

There is something there, but it's not what I think it is, and that's ok.  In fact, it's good because it generates creativity.  I can create something original and useful out of my flawed perceptions. This drawing looks a lot like my own dog, so you can see I've projected my own experience into a vague image.  My brain has reconstructed the image with detail and meaning that it expects to see which isn't actually there.

How is this misperception useful? In this case I've created a character portrait that I might be able to use in a story, or a cute image I could put on a greeting card, or a toy design, or use it as a story starter, or create fresh interesting content for my blog. ;-)  It's the same process of improvisation people use to compose art, invent technology, innovate business processes, invent scientific hypotheses, find new ways to communicate and relate to one another, and philosophize about almost anything.  Imagination creates new solutions and modifies things in ways that suit new purposes.

Cartoon Christmas Wrapping

I'm really looking forward to seeing my two little nephews this Christmas. I think I had as much fun making their gift wrapping as they will have with the gifts! The improvised cartoons were meant to be some randomly fun pictures to decorate their plain brown wrappers, but they sort of turned into a little story... a tableau of things two young siblings might like to do together in the winter.

Information Design

I have a penchant for information design.  I get all obsessive about creating systems to make key information and tasks more efficient easier to do, understand and remember.  Sometimes this manifests as illustrated graphic design, a.k.a. information design.

Bicycle Boxes

This was for the City of Guelph via Lind Design.  It's part of an education campaign to teach the public how to use the new experimental bicycle boxes, which are road markings allowing bicycles to more safely turn left across traffic.

Hypothesis Testing Flowchart

This was a personal project, a redesign of my stats professor's flowchart.  I needed to optimize it for visual learners so that I (a visual learner) could understand and remember it.  The variety of fonts, colours and shapes contain meaning, designed to differentiate and connect types of information.

Canada Post Learning Map

This learning map was made for for Canada post via Metrix Group as part of a training program for new employees.

Photography

I mostly shoot for fun, and have a preference for clouds and water.  I work closely with my wife Trina Koster who is a photographer (www.trinakoster.com).  I do most of her photo retouching and we do a lot of work together developing lighting design and photo book design.  The photographs included here are my own playing-around shots.

Click any photo for larger view.

Pricing & Rates

Illustration:

Illustration pricing depends on a few factors, including complexity (my estimated hours of labor), usage rights\copyright buy, and distribution.  And sometimes it's based on they client saying "here's the most I can spend, what can you do for that?" and then we figure something out with the style and level of detail to make it fit in the budget.  

Pricing for illustration also varies a lot depending on what industry it's being used for.  Comics, magazines, corporate, TV, advertising, rendering, storyboarding, technical, educational, information design, book covers, children's books, newspapers, packaging, animation, concept design etc. all have their own ranges of budgets, terms, and industry standards, so there is no set standard fee for an image.  So in order to calculate a rate I often refer to the Graphic Artists Guild Pricing and Ethical Guidelines book (which lists these variables in detail) to confirm my calculations.

If you want a price quote: In order to calculate fees I need to know how the artwork will be used, what media, image size, colour treatment (line art, greyscale, or colour), and a brief description of what you need to accomplish with the image.

Photo Retouching:

I use Adobe Photoshop to enhance and modify your photographs.  Skills I offer are image cleanup, lighting enhancements, colour and contrast manipulations, face and body sculpting, compositing, digital makeup, photo book layout, and photo illustration.

$75 per hour.

Lessons:

Illustration and Drawing Lessons: 

Learn Anatomical structure (humans and animals), figure drawing, perspective, light and shadow, composition, colour, and concept design.  Use paper and pencil, and digital media including Photoshop, Illustrator and Manga Studio EX.

For kids under 18, $40 per hour.

For professional designers, illustrators and artists, $75 per hour.

Photo Retouching Lessons: 

Using Photoshop or Photoshop Elements to enhance and modify your photographs.  Image cleanup, face and body sculpting, colour and contrast manipulations, compositing, digital makeup, and more.

Private lessons are $75 per hour.  

Workshops range from about $175 to $300, offered through Trina Koster Photography, see www.photoworkshopsinguelph.com.

Internships & Co-ops

Occasionally people ask me If I'd take on an intern or co-op student.  Because it takes me a long time to type up the email I thought I'd save myself some time in the future by posting my latest response (today is December 6, 2012) so you can decide if I'm a good prospective mentor:

What are your illustration and design skills?  Do you have a portfolio and a resumé I can look at? How long would the internship be and when would it need to happen?

To be completely candid with you, I'm terrible at working with an intern.  I work weird unpredictable and spontaneous hours and there's almost nothing I can delegate to someone who isn't a seasoned specialist.  From now until Christmas more than ¾ of my production work is photo retouching and solving computer and website problems for the photography business I run with my wife Trina.  In the past any time I've had a co-op student it's been a constant and unsuccessful struggle to find work for them to do and they spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for me to give them something to do.  I generally work from my home office, and sometimes I'm running down to the photo studio (a 5 minute walk) or running errands for the photo studio.  When I have it, the bulk of my illustration work is done late at night when people aren't interrupting me with questions and phone messages and requests for help of some sort.  A good deal of my photo retouching and design work is done then too… after supper, sometimes after 10pm because I go to the gyn at 8:30pm sometimes (I would not expect you to come for that but just so you know that's when a lot of this gets done).

So that being said I would be willing to consider it if you are interested in a sort of informal unstructured format.  Depending on whatever's going on at any given time you might be learning more about photo retouching than illustration, but I find that what I know about Photoshop from a photo point of view definitely improves my ability to use it as an illustration tool, and vice versa.  Depending on your skills if I can find a way to put you to work it may be photo retouching (I would train you in that), book design, or there may be occasion to have you do some illustration work, like colouring or inking or some text design or maybe even some concept development, but I can't guarantee that part. 

So, if you're interested in an experience like that let me know and we can consider it further.  I'd suggest if you can find a placement more suitable to your career plan, be willing to invest in traveling to do it.  If you find a better fit don't settle for me just because I'm convenient in Guelph.  Work with a company or a freelancer who most specifically works in the field of your interest.

Threadless Reject

This is my first design submission to Threadless (a crowd sourced T-shirt design and retail company).  I worked hard on the design and I figured it was a good one.  Even so it did not get voted/rated enough to be printed.  I'm not sure if it's because the design isn't good enough or because I don't have a big enough following that will go on there and vote for it, or maybe I didn't do a good job of communicating to my following in an inspiring way.

I'm interested in your feedback.  Got any ideas of how I could improve this design or my campaign for votes?  Email (scott@moon-man.com) or tweet me (@scott_mooney).

Cheers!
Scott

War of 1812 TV and Comics Illustrations

This summer I got to work on a historical TV program and related comics about the War of 1812 (in which America attempted to invade Canada). My client for this is Zeros2Heroes, a comics and entertainment company out of Vancouver. There were 6 episodes in total (of which I illustrated 3) and each episode was also turned into a 22 page comic book (of which I illustrated 2).  I was hired on as a penciller, so the inks and colours and lettering were designed by other artists.  These are some samples of those pencils.

These TV bits are from the episodes about Sir Isaac Brock and Laura Secord.

These comics pages are from the story of Enos Collins, the privateer that helped win the war, got rich in the process and founded a bank now known as the CIBC, which is one of the biggest banks in the world right now.

Mighty Bubble Issue 3

My latest Mighty Bubble minicomic.  I went for a retro 3 colour treatment on the cover because it looks cool and sophisticated, and to save time… it’s actually a really efficient way to colour something.  Lazy or efficient?  You be the judge.

Mighty Bubble is a character I created (in collaboration with the communications team at AECOM) for Hudbay Inc. as a part of their corporate citizenship with Flinflon Manitoba/Saskatchewan (the town straddles the border).  Mighty Bubble is part of an ongoing campaign to get kids excited about hand washing. Fun things I’ve created for the campaign include Mighty Bubble himself and his accompanying characters, stickers, puzzles, activity sheets, temporary tattoos, and of course the comics, written and drawn by yours truly.  It’s a really fun and creative program to be a part of.  I really want the program to grow from Flinflon to the rest of the world.  It's a great public message with huge potential to improve public health, and the kids are loving it.

Canadian History Doodle

Here's a little character study for a period piece I'm working on for an entertainment company.  And that may be about all I'm legally allowed to say right now.  But I thought it was a nice image and this will likely be the only place anyone will ever see it.  It's a doodle I made in the margin of the script to help me get a sense of the character.  The final product ended up being something quite different than this.