Time to Read – John W. Tomac

Time travel is all the rage, these days.

In books, that is.

The Chicago Tribune took a look at this literary trend this past weekend. I got to draw this poorly-mannered Apatosaurus, no longer constrained by the space-time continuum, to accompany their story.

A big thanks goes to art director David Syrek for the fun assignment.

The Mortgage Observer: 50 Important People

This is my first post here, so I'd be remiss if I didn't start by thanking Chris and the rest of the gang at Illostop for the invitation. Thank you for having me, I'm excited to be here.

The March issue of The Mortgage Observer highlights the 50 Most Important People in Commercial Real Estate Financing. While I did not make the list, I had the good fortune of creating the cover. Art director Ed Johnson asked for something with a big 50 and skyscrapers. I was more than happy to oblige. What can I say, I like drawing buildings. That may or may not be related to the countless hours I wasted in my younger days playing Sim City 2000.

Below an alternate version with a bigger 50 and smaller city.

I also made some attempts at giving this a little more of a conceptual twist.

In the end, we went ahead with a pretty straight forward solution, which for a cover makes the most sense.

The Wreck of NFIP

quick ideas for sad and concerned fish

Rough value sketch, before picking a better fish

Color sketch with type placed

scanned finished paint, pre-photoshop

Finished painting with photoshop finishing touches. 

This was an overnight gig for The Weekly Standard. More of a feat of creating believable atmosphere than anything really clever, but super fun to work on nonetheless.
-S

New drawings and Dexter's mug

Apologies for the lack of posts. I'm still up to my elbows in graphite and really should stay there for a while. But, when the blog collects dust, I get progressively antsy. I am quite antsy. So, again, my apologies. At some point in the future, I'll throw a bucketload of drawings at you. Please bear with me till then and enjoy the handful I'm allowed to leak out.

Oh, and I made time a while back to produce a quickie Dexter portrait sample for my rep. Hope ya dig it. 

Thanks for reading!
S

The end of the world

I love to illustrate the dark passages, the mysterious and the strange. And lately I have been pretty lucky about that.
The first is the cover for the Spanish edition of Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich for Siruela Editorial. I love drawing and painting landscapes and it is rarely that working on Editorial you get to do a pure landscape piece so I was jumped at the opportunity with out thinking. The novel deals with tradition and heritage through the voices of a family of Native American from North Dakota.


I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do so I only presented sketches with variations on the same theme. I also had a back up sketch that I might actually do when I get some free time.






I wanted the piece to be moody so I emphasized that in the sketch, my sketches are usually less developed, altough for covers I aim for a very clear reading of what type of cover it will be even with rough art.

The piece is a combination of ink, liquid pencil (which is pretty fantastic) and digital.


This second piece was a full page spread for an article on School Library Journal about today's dystopian novels. Only thing I can say about this is that I had a total blast doing it.





This is the kind of sketches I scare AD with these days. A simple outlay of the composition and some hints on color, but that is basically it. Nobody has outspoken yet but I can tell they are afraid...

So I am looking forward to more of these in the future, but now back to making comics and books...

ESPN, Wall Street Journal, Billboard, etc, etc

In between all the books I have done and the current ones I am doing now I get to do some really fun editorial pieces. I love the oasis these jobs represent while working on larger projects. The quick turnarounds and the different themes help give distance when you return to working on the books, and these kind of images are always a joy to work with. Also since you can't really disclose much of the books you are doing until they are out it allows for showing something once in a while.




For the Wall Street Journal, Book review section on the excessive violence of books aimed at teenagers.
For Las Vegas Weekly on the rising fear on communism in the U.S.
For ESPN Fantasy football issue, Ron Landry

For Billboard magazine on the Amazon cloud music service.

Thanks so much to the amazing AD for inviting me on this fun ride.