Bronx Rain

Made for Edyson Julio’s short story, “If I Decide So.”

This flash-fiction piece tells the story of a young woman in moments of desperation and reflection of her life outside of the prison walls.

“…That maybe the sky is waiting for me to watch it once more, or that the rain wants to kiss my dark skin before the clouds dry. Sometimes I toss water from the sink into the air above me, and let it fall over my head and shoulders. If I close my eyes fast enough it feels natural, like Bronx rain.”

New York State of Terror

Give it another look…

What do you see?  What kind of mood does this image give off?  Well, give it another look.  This image is called Hide & Seek.  The point of this image is to let you tell the story of what is happening and feel a certain way.  However after looking closer at what is happening in the image, you should think and feel something entirely different!

The “Untold” Series: Story 1

This marks the first illustration in a series of anonymously submitted stories as part of a visual storytelling experiment.

The experiment: “Tell me a story from your life you’ve never told anyone about. Make it funny, make it sad, make it scandalous or scary, but I don’t want to know who you are. Unless it’s part of the story, I wouldn’t even like to know your age, what you look like, or even if you’re male or female. It is from your stories that I will develop a series of illustrations.”

Story 1

Submitted by: Anonymous

To this day I have no idea if this was imagined or true.  I awoke one morning as usual, did the morning routine and left my apartment.  As I was in the vestibule about to leave the building, I felt a sensation of weightlessness.   I suddenly felt my hand slowly brush against the wall in an upward motion.  “what is happening to me?” I thought in astonishment and terror.  Before I knew it I was holding my hands over my head to prevent from hitting my head on the ceiling.  I then felt the front door open and said to myself that I can control it and see if I can go outside.  As I passed the doorway, I felt a sudden rush of energy pulling me out.  Suddenly I was floating higher and higher almost uncontrollably but I felt like as long as I could keep my mind on where I was going I would travel in that direction.

Unfortunately that is all I remember about that event, but I somehow know that it was only possible because no one was around.  I found it incredibly strange.

Johnny Rooster Style Guide

Johnny Rooster is a superstitious baseball player with a lot on his mind.  Johnny, originally created for a clothing line, became a character I used for a number of comic strips.  This body of work includes style guide sheets and some examples of the comics, ranging from single image, daily strips, and a sunday strip.

Dark Side Over The Rainbow

This piece was once a quick daily sketch that I had done for the blog I started at PC with some students in the illustration department.

The story behind it comes from Pink Floyd’s album, Dark Side of the Moon, and the theory that it syncs with the Wizard of Oz.  I wanted to capture that idea in a single image without relying on sound or text, so I found that incorporating the album cover’s prism and rainbow would coincide perfectly with the scene where the film turns from black and white into color.

I wanted there to be a distinct look between the two worlds, yet show that they can exist together, so the black and white part of the image is done with line-work and digital shading while Oz is created from colored shapes that make up Munchkin land.

The title of this is again a combo of the album and the movie. The scene that is referenced in my image is just before Dorothy sings “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” which speaks to the transition to color and the rainbow coming from the prism in her hand.

BlindSided

This was my take on an article I found in GQ magazine about a young man who’s identity came into question after becoming a high school basketball star.  I modified the page design slightly, but I wanted to try and create this editorial illustration within the confines of the magazine’s current design.

Self Portrait

I am known by many names to many different people.  I started thinking about identity and how it may change depending on the people who surround you.  Depending on those people, I may be a brother, a football player, an RA or an illustrator, so I used a self portrait project to address the essence of one’s identity and the duality that I believe exists within any given person.