Art Blog

Building a Brand – Saafi Behavior

While the brunt of the work I do at my current job is laying out and designing signs and displays, sometimes clients come to us to help build their brand and design logos and other assets they will use for their business. This client was opening a behavioral health services company and needed to come…
Concession Stand Menu Board

The State Fair in Minnesota is, to put it lightly, a pretty big deal. I was tasked with designing a menu board for a vendor at the State Fair. The vendor sent me a hand-sketched thumbnail layout and the information they wanted to be conveyed. I was also sent along some excellent and tasty-looking image…
Character Design/Color Scheme

It’s no secret that I’m a big nerd so of course it also shouldn’t be a surprise that I play D&D. It’s a ton of fun and it means I get to hang out with my closest friends at least once a week. The snack food doesn’t hurt the experience either. After starting a…
‘Play the Dragon’ Cover Illustration

I was recently commissioned by my good friend Ryan Molina to do some illustration work for his upcoming book. This is actually the second book of his I’ve done art for and it’s always a blast to work with a fellow nerd. Here, I’ve done an illustration of the iconic Dragon Ball protagonist Goku playing…
Skillshare – Patterns

Another night, another Skillshare class. This time I worked on creating patterns in Photoshop and saving them for future use and sharing. It was a neat, quick exercise exploring ideas that I’ve always wanted to play with, but never sunk my teeth into HOW to do it. I can see how this skillset could be…
Skillshare – Advanced Photoshop Glow Effects

Tonight I wanted to work on a few more Photoshop tools to fill out my, well, toolkit. I found a neat, quick class on Skillshare called “Advanced Photoshop Glow Effects” taught by a very skilled and knowledgeable instructor named Manu De May. It’s a quick walk through, less than an hour, getting some nice effects,…
Skillshare – Photo Manipulation

I recently completed a course on Skillshare working with photo manipulation and learning some more granular details about Photoshop and some of the tools that I had a general knowledge of. This course dealt a lot at first with Photoshop and image basics, which really nagged at me to skip ahead, but I’ve run into…
Apparel Design

For a recent job application I was asked to design t-shirts based on prompts provided by the job poster. For those prompts, I chose two – Create a t-shirt design for Traveler’s Insurance 5K Run/Walk. Must include Traveler’s logo, with space around it. Must be a 2 color design with red incorporated either in the…
A Fantasy Adventure With My Niece

Last spring, my niece was given an assignment – to send a flat version of herself to someone who lives in a different place. The person who received it would take photos and journal their adventures together and send them back for presenting to the class. While I certainly took her around Saint Paul…
Trying SkillShare

I’ve wanted to try and expand my horizons and diversify my skills when it comes to design and I knew I couldn’t do it alone. So, I’ve decided to give SkillShare a try. SkillShare is a service where thousands of experts teach you almost anything under the sun – from motion graphics to sewing to,…