Lion in the Sun

A few months ago, I created a Brooklyn Bridge themed invitation for my wedding. I'm pleased to announce that image is now available for your invitations and stationary at Lion in the Sun.

Lion in the Sun is a full service paperie located in Park Slope, Brooklyn specializing in unique custom invitations for every occasion. They have a terrific selection on Brooklyn-centric and New York-themed designs. They have a wonderful staff that helps turn out some sophisticated and well-designed products.

Check them out if you find yourself in Brooklyn and/or are in need of invitations.

Picking a Winner

Here's a recent spot illo I worked on for Barron's. (Full disclosure: I work there as a graphic designer in the art department.) The art ran with a story ranking the best (and worst) stock brokers over the previous 6 months, 1-year, 3-years and 5-years. In other words, which firms have done the best job picking winners. Art director was Diane Sipprelle.

This was an initial sketch that focused more on a happy and unhappy bettor. Here the decision was made to focus on just the horses.

Two more options, they went with the latter.

The New Mrs. Tomac

It's been a while since my last update and with good reason. I got married. Since the wedding and honeymoon, I've been fairly busy with new work, some of which I'll be showing off here in the near future.

Photo by the awesome Erica Lyn.

Buy Art, Support a Great Cause

On September 22, 2009 I was diagnosed with chronic myelogenous leukemia.

Nine months later, I'm feeling a lot better. So much so that I'm planning running the New York City Marathon this fall to help raise money for Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and their relentless pursuit of a cure for blood cancers.

To help meet my fundraising goals, I will be donating 100% of my profits from my imagekind shop to this worthy cause until November 7.

You get art for your wall, the world gets closer to a cure for leukemia and lymphoma. I can't think of a better combination.

Visit johnwtomac.imagekind.com buy art and know that a sizable portion of your purchase price will go to charity.

If you don't have enough room on your walls for art you can support my efforts at beatcancer.johnwtomac.com

And if you see something here or here that's not for sale, contact me and I'll make it available, as long as I have the rights to do so.

New to Chico? There's an app for that

This week, the class of 2014 will begin showing up at California State University at Chico for freshman orientation. The Chico News & Review has put together a special edition for the occasion. It is filled with useful information for those new to the area.

I was contacted by art director Tina Flynn to illustrate the cover. For this project, she wanted to show a smartphone screen with Chico-centric apps. The challenge was figuring out how to fit a narrow device in a more square-shaped space.

I played around with a few variations.
Phone with glow around it.
Phone flying forward.
Phone on the ground. I envisioned a glow emenating from the screen lighting up the nameplate.

Ultimately, the decision was made to go with a device that had similar proportions to the page.

At this stage the editors were still a bit undecided on some of the apps, since the wider proportion gave them a chance to create a few more.

Eventually we figured out all 12 and the app icons were reused on the inside with a feature highlighting things to do in Chico.

U.S. Against the World

This is another job for The Record, Northern New Jersey's daily newspaper.

Shortly after finishing up my last assignment for them, the gentlemen who run the art department there, Jerry Luciani and Bob Rebach asked if I would illustrate the cover of the paper's World Cup Preview.

The section was going to be a tabloid despite the papers normal broadsheet publishing format. That meant, I'd have a squarish sort of space to work with. and would need to work in the section nameplate in the top left corner and leave space for a headline The working headline I got was U.S. against the World.

Here are the initial sketches I put together:
Goalkeeper diving to stop a ball, which looks like a globe. U.S. stopping the world

Here's a player bending it around the world toward a goal suggesting the U.S. finally getting by some of the World's biggest teams

The thinking here was more a United Front ready to take on the world.

Kicking a ball from a new position in the soccer world, near the top. We're not a third-rate soccer country anymore

Jerry liked what was going on in that last sketch near the top, but thought that the player should be bigger and kicking the globe. Happy to oblige, I worked up this and was off to the finish.

For The Record, Not Everyone Loves Your Pets

A couple of week's ago, I was contacted by my old friends at The Record to illustrate a feature for the front of their weekly Real Estate section.

The story looked at the challenges pet owners face when trying to sell their homes. In the current market, animal dander, minor pet damage or even signs a pet lives in the house can turn off prospective buyers. Similarly, realtors aren't always prepared to show houses with animals inside. That can lead to a situation where agents are shocked to find the owner's large dogs wandering the house or cats are accidentally let out of the house.

The layout called for a more horizontal image because half of the page was going to occupied by an advertisement. Here are some of the sketches:


This was based on the author and editor's suggestion. The idea was to incorporate as much imagery from the rough draft as possible: realtor letting the cat out, dog on furniture, turtles in bathroom, notes around the house warning about the animals...



Here's the image that was picked. I thought having the cat and dog on the couch would suggest animals that had the run of the house, which seemed to be the basis for the problems sellers and realtors were encountering.



Here's another idea; the dog is the feature of the house for sale that really jumps out at you.