GLL Wine Cover

Hello, all! Summer is winding down which means sleepless nights due to insane heat will soon be replaced by sleepless nights due to insane work. I hope you've all gotten your fill of beaches, hammocks and mojitos (but I think we can all agree, enough is never enough).

My summer as a tanned, jobless bum ended a few weeks ago when I was hired by the nice people at Great Lakes Life magazine. I do a lot of different tasks there, but by far the most enjoyable thing is illustration, and here is the first published image I've done for them (and their first illustrated cover, ever). This is the cover for their annual food and wine issue and I was asked to have a wine bottle and have something growing out of it, while having a psychedelic feel. Artists they gave as examples were Romero Britto and Peter Max. The only real guidelines I was forced to follow were image size and room needed to be left for headlines. The turnaround for this project was really short, and with that considered, I'm pretty happy with the piece. It's very different from the stuff I usually do.
So if you're in Ohio, Pennsylvania or New York, go out and pick up one of these bad-boys. If they sell enough, maybe I'll get to do this sort of thing again.

My original artwork before it was spruced up by the graphic designers:
Here are the original concepts for the piece:I've also got my hands in a few other cookie jars right now, but the projects are still "hush-hush" so it'll be a while before they turn up here. Now, go out and enjoy some sunshine.