I am Back!!

Dear Readers,

I know I know... I am a broken record, but seriously I have a good reason for my lack of posts and disappearance for the past few months. You might ask, "so whats up and where have you been or what have you been up to" and the answer is a lot and now I am ready to share a list of them with you all.

First off the big one was that I got MARRIED :-) in October and little to say that was my life for September through the middle of October. After the Honeymoon I got several amazing job offers and had to do a lot flying from MN to San Francisco for a few weeks. I accepted a great Art Director position for a talented and great Gaming Studio called Telltale Games. I am sure some of you have heard of them, as they are responsible for such great episodic games as Sam & Max and of course their big hit at the moment is the newly redone Lucas Art's Classic Tales of Monkey Island! With that being said I am excited to add my mind and talents to the mix at Telltale.

Well if you have been following my blog over the past years you all might be saying WOW what happened to my Senior position at Ham and the answer is I decided to leave Ham. They were running into several issues that I will not go into too much detail about but they had to lay off several people/friends, as well as cut everyone's salaries and so on. I loved the work I did there a lot but I had a really hard time with that and seeing what was happening to the people I cared about and seeing the economic downward spiral happening there, SOOOOO I took a fulltime contract position with a gaming company called Electrotank as there Senior UI Designer/ 2d Artist. I got to work on some really cool work and will share it down the road once I can, the only thing I can say about it is "ubi" hehe

Now that I am married, moved/settling into California life while starting a seriously cool career path I think it's time to get back to the web and get my word out again.

I hope people will read this once I get back into the swing of things and please post comments or ask me anything you would like and if I can answer them I will.

As an end note I am going to be posting all of our cool wedding stuff I made for the big day.

Take it easy and here is to the future and happiness for both my personal life and career!

Thanks for reading and enjoying my works.

-Stephen

Historical Pieces

Hello,

I have been really busy lately working on a bunch of items for our wedding, like invites, website and other fun items.

Along with that I have been swamped with work which I will make my next post about.

In the mean time here is some more side projects I did for Amanda on my downtime. I got the pleasure to do the button for the Lumberjack Days in Stillwater, MN. Amanda works for the Washington Historical Society and submitted my design to the board and they loved it. Everyone that attends will get their hands on one.

The next things I got to do for Amanda was for Hay Lake Day at the Hay Lake School Museum, where she is the Site Manager. This piece was more traditional and for families. I went with a mix of a rich sketch and clean design/icons.

Below is the full sketch I did for this poster.

Keep an eye out for more work and please let me know you all think and I hope you keep checking in.

Bands and Family Crests

Hi there,

Recently I finished up some really fun projects for a band and a client's personal family crest. I thought they turned out nice, so I hope ya enjoy!!

These pieces were done for We the Living a small up and coming band. We are still waiting to hear if they will be using them in the future if not I got some cool work out of it.

The band gave me the art direction for the below image from a chemical truck they saw on tour that had a cool chemical symbol with hands and asked if I could take that and come up with something for them. I turned the symbol into a "w" shape for "We" in We the Living. Also made the hands clean and graphic. Even though this idea wasn't mine I think it turned out ok for what they wanted.

Below is an image for some possible clothing for their tours.

This last image was done for a commissioned project. He wanted a family crest because of the work I have done with Family crest in the past. It also turned out fun and something different then my other crests.

Thanks for checking in and I hope to have some more projects up soon!!

For Amanda

Hello,

Well, here is something super quick I did with Amanda for her historic site, Hay Lake School Museum's Beer Tasting Event. We had a ball playing up the Beer and coming up with a way to display what she needed for the event.

The design is a mix of type play and playing up the flat graphic look of classic poster that she wanted for the flier.

Hope you all enjoy!
-Stephen

TWO MORE GAMES

Evening,

Still busy working on two new games and a really cool educational interactive product that will hopefully go to market in 2010-2011 school year. Other then work I have been busy wedding planning well I should say being supportive to Amanda while she plans haha. I am designing and building our life site that will kick off with our wedding. I'm also illustrating a cute image for our wedding invites, so little to say I am swamped and kept busy.

I thought it would be great to post two more games that recently launched. One of which is SpongeBob SquarePants: Gary's Adventure and it has to be one of my favorite games. I got to handle everything from concept, design, illustration and animation. This was my baby for 4 months or so. Being proud of it I took some screen shots of it being the "Top Game" for the past 3 weeks on Nick.com and Spongebob.nick.com and its still going strong at number one.

The last thing I will show you is a game for SPAM (that's right the food). This was a lot of fun to illustrate, animate and brainstorm. Based off everything SPAM wanted and all the rules based around that property, I think it turned out great.

Here are the links to both games:
http://spongebob.nick.com/games/play/spongebob-gary/
http://www.spam.com/howto/game

Enjoy,
Stephen





SPAM:

More fun work!

Evening,
Hey there everyone. I have been super busy again working away on three more games and recently two sites. One of which this post will be about. I completely designed this site head to toe. This site also has a game that I designed. Its a fun word game that is just random and addicting. HAMJAM is an annual party/ throw down for HAM's clients, friends and well friends of friends. Last year I designed a brick breaking game and t-shirts. The theme this year was the 30s feel and just taking what you have and making something. The inspriration for this site was found art and just retro. Hope you like!! Here ya go the live site for ya to check out. HAMJAM

-enjoy

Sketches and trip stuff!

Hello,

I have been running around catching up on some major work since my trip to Boston. The trip to Boston was mainly fun because of the ride there with Amanda, we had a ball rocking out while on our 26+ hour straight drive to the hotel we stayed at in Boston.

It was a tiring/challenging trip seeing family plus trying to enjoy ourselves and eat and drink some good New England food. My niece was cute but really over the top with her bossy "no" action the whole time we were there, it was hard to get her to socialize with me, Amanda or anyone and even giving me her uncle a hug was like a battle. But I love her and we had our few precious moments!!

There were several highlights to the trip which I will post below for you all to see. Once we got back it was time to work late nights and catch up on several large projects (mainly games) that had to get wrapped up and kicked off. Since I posted last there have been two games that have launched and a couple of other projects that I started and I'm currently finishing up. I will save those projects for another post later. So please check back I am trying to keep to my promise of updating as much as possible. haha so we will see!! Below are several sketches in my favorite style I am developing lately for both my redesign to my current site and also some fun family style imagery.

Hope you all enjoy and please keep me on my toes and ask for more work it will help motivate me to keep this beast alive.

-Stephen

Enjoying the best Guinness I have ever had ummm..... that was a great Irish bar in Boston.

Hanging out with the dead people in Salem Mass. that be witch country.

This had to be the best moment I had with my niece Bella. We did some doodling together.

This was one of the highlights of the trip for me and Amanda, Hanging out with my BEST MAN Amiel!! Watch out folks he has got some insane skills and is going to be releasing his beautiful art on the world.

This is a sketch for the up and coming redesign to onebluebird.com

Some doodles of the fun hanging elements in the site that will be animated.

My hope is to turn this into my music/sound on and off controller for my site redesign.

Just a fun sketch of what I think my mom looked like young and holding me for the first time haha. Not sure what the crown is about but I have been putting that in all my pieces lately.

Winter time is almost over and I thought I would post this playful image of Amanda and her process in building the greatest snowman ever!! (totally thinking about turning this into a poster or postcard)

Back from Boston

Hello,

Well we made it back from Boston in one piece. It was a fun drive there with lots of stops and visiting with Family and friends. I got to see my main man/Best man which was great. Took lots of pictures which I will post as soon as I can get them off the camera. Got to see my niece for the first time and let me just say it was interesting to see how she didn't like people and it took forever for her to warm up to anyone even her uncle. But hey I got to draw with her and give her a stuffed horse to hug. Other then that the trip was very tiring and as they say "I need a vacation from my vacation". I thought for today I would just post a few recent sketches that I doodled. Keep a look out for pictures, details about the visit and also a huge amount of sketches I want to post.

-enjoy

Here is a sketch I did while sitting in meetings and thought about kids, Mario Brothers (my version looks like an angry hitler) and questioning designer:
Here is a sketch I made in my new travel sketchbook. I hope to start filling this one up soon: