One of the things I love most about being the senior staff illustrator for In Touch Ministries is the diversity of styles and techniques I get to use in my illustrations. As opposed to what many illustrators out there have to do as a necessity (it’s easier to market your skills if you have an identifiable style), I don’t feel the pressure to have a certain “look” to my work; I get to play around with different approaches, depending on what I feel a particular article calls for.
Cases in point being the two illustrations below. This first one is for a piece entitled “When a Gift Becomes a Given”. In the article, the author speaks of a certain modern art print, and how what had at first been a piece that made him stop and ponder every time he saw it eventually became something he didn’t even notice. I wanted to pull that modern art motif into the accompanying illustration (created using ArtRage):
This next one is for a piece entitled “Bringing Bethlehem Home”. A family starts a new Christmas tradition of trekking through the snow on Christmas night to visit a tiny manger scene set up in humble surroundings. I chose a crisp, clean approach to convey the cold night air, and a close-up of the Christ-child figurine in a small, mittened hand to capture the intimacy of the setting (done in Photoshop):
All art copyright ©In Touch Ministries. Used with permission.