Chance the rapper is a very talented and I have drawn him before but I wanted to try a new style with a digital painting. Came up with a bunch of new techniques and was able to experiment in alot of fun ways! Enjoy!

I wanted a very loose and painterly look to this. I also overlayed a canvas texture to simulate a traditional painting feel. This will be part of a larger painting consisting of all three album covers from Chance. Stay tuned!

The album artwork for rapper: Gator Stephens. Available everywhere now! This project started with a photoshoot to gather ideas and reference images. I then moved on to sketching and blocking in tones and values in photoshop. This being a digital painting, it was a bit of a learning curve to develop the background elements. The background had to work with the rapper in the center and not be too distracting.

THE BEGINNING

Last summer I met Bryan (Gator Stephens). He said he was working on something big, something next level. And he needed the art to go with it. To be the face of it. Naturally I was hooked. I was all in. However I only had 1 month to get it done. We started discussing, brainstorming, listening to the album. I got this idea to just go on a photoshoot. Get the creative juices flowing. It was a crazy request, but I knew I was in. One month to create a dynamic scene with energy, style and a theme complementing the album.

While just an album cover -- just a tiny blip that is just the face of the real art, I think it is super important. The cover art is what people immediately think of when they think of an album. It had to be good.

This is the biggest project I have worked on (literally) and it was an honor to create for the ASU Polytechnic campus. After many rounds of design with another designer I was asked to try and create this monumental design. The struggle here, was making something that fit perfectly within ASU’s branding. I had to uphold their rigorous guidelines and make something to be proud of. The content was researched and created by Claire Beuden and the design by myself. It details the changes in printing from the very beginning to modern day. Designing at this scale was also a challenge. It was about 40 ft long and designing something that large, I had to take into account many things. Such as where people’s eyes would be level with the main content and not be too low or too high. It was a successful attempt and was put up in the Technology center at ASU.

The goal of this project was to photograph people on location with strobes balanced with ambient light. I chose to photograph Amy Flores as a musician playing a guitar in the street in Downtown Chandler. For my first location I chose an alleyway, and tried to get an interesting composition with the lines of the alleyway disappearing in the background. The ambient lighting wasn’t working for me and I decided to move elsewhere. We found a side street with some interesting colored cubes leading to the street. This is where we took the most shots and experimented quite a bit. I had several good shots from this shoot but something about this one was quite warm and inviting. I feel it worked well with the area and blended nicely. For the final shot my settings were f/5.0 at 1/320 sec. I also included two more notable shots from the shoot.

Hogue Inc. Magazine Ad Campaign

I was given a chance to come up with a concept for Hogue’s latest magazine campaign. The challenge was to use the existing branding, make it feel right and stand out in a magazine, and introduce a new spin with the branding.

Using their fonts, styles and colors I went with a dark smoky theme with the goal to highlight the product as much as possible. The product on a black background was the best way I could think of the make it pop. I also loved how I integrated the typography as a background element, as the features and the name. One thing that I was worried about was if the faded text was going to be visible in the printed product. To my delight it worked perfectly the first time and all of these were ran.

This was a large magazine advertisement campaign that I did with Hogue Inc. These ads were run and are going to be ran in a number of different magazines. Such as: Gun World, Knives Illustrated, Beckett, and many more.

The first part of an upcoming larger project. Matt Hogue needed branding for his new company, Trip tech. Trip tech is a line of phone and tablet accessories designed to offer more functionality for you. The challenging part of this was creating a professional design, while still having a fun youthful energy. This product needed to appeal to younger generation as well as the older.

An elf rogue caught in the woods.

The difficult part of this painting was the scene. Although the majority of the frame is her face, I wanted to convey that she was in a dark foresty area. I made a blurry greenish background as well as a shadow over her face. Getting this right took some effort. I actually used an image of leaves, but I had to find one that didn’t cover too much of her important features. Also turning an image into a shadow was an interesting challenge. Hope you like it and the process images as well!

BG Cover Art

Strong and Proud. The knight kneels down, to rest momentarily after a wound. She will not give in. She will not give up.

Azeka’s Sauce needed an overhaul. A complete rebranding. Azeka Sauce was for sale at the Tempe Aloha Festival in 2015 and sold 70 bottles. In 2018, with my new branding it sold approximately 700. The only thing that changed? The look of the bottle.

The purpose of this book is to give beginners, such as myself at the start of my journey, a good grasp of the principles and tips and tricks that I wished that I had learned when I first started out.

What follows is a series of projects done for Hogue Inc.

I have been commissioned to create many logos over the past few years and decided to share a few!

A friend of mine wrote a book and asked me to illustrate the characters in it. It is currently not available for purchase.

Cover art concept. Done for a friend.

The cover of the book entightled, “Book of the Betrayer.”

The ten (10) steps of the Startup Roadmap: Aha To Exit identifies the process beginning with the innovators idea as a tool to control the process. Our goal here was to give the entrepreneur a tool to take the pieces and organize them towards building a position in the market with a designed process of execution. The Startup Atlas is an illustrated book that expands on the steps, and particularly the sub steps, to better clarify the process that entrepreneurs need to take on their journey.

This project is the culmination of the design and printing processes for the book written by Aram Chavez, professor and entrepreneur. The design was created with a target audience of entrepreneurs looking to scale their business with a process. This book is for people asking these questions:

Ever felt lost while trying to make a startup?

Not sure which direction to go in, or where to begin?

Or, perhaps you are unsure what your next step, in your already-established business, is.

The Startup Atlas is a do-it-yourself guide that provides readers with the resources and know-how to take your Aha Moment, all the way to Exit. An Aha moment is the initial idea for a business, and the exit is defined as successfully exiting your company.

At the advice of my professor, for this project I only created the first chapter. However, the final version will have ten chapters. The final product is about the concepts discussed in Aram’s courses and offers extra education to those enrolled in the courses. The book includes the main concepts of entrepreneurship in ten steps. Within the structure of ten (10) steps that were illustrated in ten chapters. Each step a pillar of details, not limited to: principals, terms, responsibilities, people, competencies, milestones and events. For this project I focused on everything leading up to the end of the first chapter. At around 30 - 45 pages, it is a design-heavy book, with illustrations and images.