AXA Financial -images go from print to the web

To see all my illustration portfolio samples, visit stevensalerno.com

For a few years now, I have been doing near-monthly illustrations for the AXA Financial company magazine named Enterprise... an internal publication for their thousands of employees.

All the illustrations I did were done in black and one color. Posted above are a couple of the past illustrations for their magazine.

This month though, their magazine ceased to be printed (on paper)... instead, Enterprise is now an on-line publication, but viewed only on an internal company web site. The editor, Bennett Cooperman has kept me on as the illustrator, and I am no longer limited to “black & one color” images. Now, I can create the images in full color. Also posted here is the recent full color illustration I created (and the companion sketch). Like many business related images these days, the concept for this illustration revolves around navigating current stormy financial times, all while keeping an eye on the future, hence the sea captain and rough seas metaphor .

VaZing... a recent web commercial project

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Just before the Christmas holidaze in 2008, I was contacted by Mark Kushinsky, the CEO of Insight Direct and was asked to be on board with a web commercial project featuring their new web service product named VaZing. He had seen some illustration samples of mine on the web and felt my imaging style was a good match. 

The web commercial was to be produced by Voicewalk (creators of web-based Flash demos... the team I worked with was Saul Ives, Darren Ursino and Martin Guitar). Once the contract with Insight Direct was confirmed, I jumped right in because it was a quick deadline. 

Insight Direct already had the basic voiceover script for me to interpret and develop the rough storyboard from. A first draft full story board (b&w) was presented to Voicewalk for their comments and suggestions to help edit down the visuals to better match the timing of the voiceover narrative. A second, more refined full story board (color) was then submitted for comments and approval by Voicewalk and the client. Once approval was given, next I did a couple of the final vector Adobe Illustrator images and sent them to Voicewalk, so they could review the images and determine if there were going to be any problems implementing them into Flash. (I guess too many anchor points within a vector image is an issue, so I had to keep the images simple. I used brush lines, fills and some basic gradations... but no filter effects, etc...)

Then it was just a matter of doing and submitting all the final vector images to Voicewalk for them to do their thing and implement the images into the “limited-animation” VaZing web commercial. My animated portion is the first 60 seconds of the 4 minute product demo. 

Posted here are a few of the first round story board sketches in black & white, and the corresponding final vector Adobe Illustrator color images (cropped a little bit). 

watch animation portion of client's web commercial for VaZing 

Click on the above link to view just the animation portion of the VaZing demo I worked on. If that does not work go to http://www.vazing.com and on their homepage click the “watch demo” button. After the 60 second animation portion is finished, just bail out from the site. 

Once the web commercial was completed, Mark Kushinsky really liked the “office manager” character I created, so he then wanted me to also illustrate three simple web ads on the VaZing web site featuring this same office manager character. 

It was a fast and fun project... and it looks like there is a possibility I may be doing a second web commercial project for another division of Insight Direct named MaidPro.

Royal Bank of Canada

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A handful of years ago, through SPUR Communications (in Kansas City) David Svet, Creative Director, I worked on a CD-ROM project for the Royal Bank of Canada's insurance and annuity division. It was an advertisement/tutorial using the story line of a couple making decisions regarding their retirement plans.

I created many vector images of the characters and backgrounds in Adobe Illustrator... then the production designers implemented them into a flash program to minimally animate the images for the CD-ROM. I thought I'd post them here now, just to show examples of images created digitally on my Wacom Tablet in Adobe Illustrator, because my web site portfolios does not show any image samples created in this manner. (Most images I create are drawn & painted, scanned, then compiled in layers in Photoshop with additional digital modifications.)

My Secret Golf Graphics (Shhhh!)

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Anyone who knows me, is aware that I love to play golf. (Not today, of course: it's 37 degrees and raining!) I grew up playing golf as a kid in New England... and even won my State Golf Association Junior Amateur Championship when I was18 years old at the Equinox CC in Vermont. I then went off to design school in NYC, graduated from Parsons School of Design, and worked as an illustrator for a handful of years in NYC. Then, burnt out from everything, and the city... I ended up living in Connecticut and became an assistant golf professional at The Yale Golf Club (Yale University's golf course in New Haven, CT) and an apprentice in the PGA (Professional Golfers Association of America)... passing their required PAT (playing ability test) and going through their first stage of business school. After a few years in the golf world... I then went back to being an illustrator for my career again. The “golf years” segment of my life seems like a million years ago now... but was so much fun.

A couple of my golf buddies here in NYC are also illustrators: James Yang, and Annette Vasilakis. Annette took a photo of me swinging a club and integrated it into one of her photo/illustration assignments for a sports publication (see first photo posted at the top, which is accompanied by a photo James took of me playing the 18th hole at Bethpage Black Course). Now, I usually play golf once a week... though not nearly as well as I did when I was in younger, but I still love it. When I'm not too busy with my illustration assignment work or children's book projects, sometimes I take a little time and experiment with creating golf related images, just for myself. 

The images posted here are not ones I ever show, because they are not consistent with my “career” illustration style. They are just for my own enjoyment as an expression of my interest in the game, and it's history. The 2nd and 3rd images from the top are details from a national golf architecture design competition I entered a couple years ago. The bottom two images are: a small painting I did of Ben Hogan practicing, and a drawing of Sam Snead entitled ‘Original Smooth.”

...here is a clip of me at the practice range, hitting a 3-metal draw.

Doodle Power

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To see all my illustration portfolio samples, visit stevensalerno.com 

Doodling, like singing in the shower... is an uninhibited act, because there is no one around to try and impress. The best doodling, I feel, occurs when you are simultaneously talking on the telephone or watching television. Or in a classroom. (I remember my high school chemistry class. At the end of the year I gave my teacher 119 pages of doodles I had executed during his class. I think the gift raised my grade from a C to a B!) The distraction of listening to something while you doodle helps it to be an unselfconscious expression. 

Doodling is different than sketching. Most sketches are executed with forethought, or intention toward developing an idea or image to a more evolved stage either for yourself or for an art director. (eg: having an idea for a painting and conducting a series of sketches to fine tune your image toward the end result) But a doodle, in comparison, is like improvisational jazz...you just begin making a mark, without quite knowing or caring what it will become in the end, and the brain is so lightning fast that once the pen line starts moving you instantly form an evolving opinion of what you will “draw” and spontaneously direct the form accordingly. Suddenly you have made a face with an expression, or a character in a pose, etc... 

The doodles, shown above, were culled from pads and throw-away scraps of paper (on which I do the bulk of my daily doodling!). Numbers 2. and 5. above (the boy wrapped in green leaves and the other image of the weird looking fellow in pink) were probably done when I happened to be standing at my drawing table, had access to watercolors or colored inks, and this is why they look more “rendered”... but both started out as lines and marks that simply grew into an image without any pre-planning. (it's funny that the character at the top of number 4. kind of looks like a teenage George Bush!) I chose these images because they all depict “people,” just to give this posting a theme... but I should have also shown a pure classic doodle consisting of just odd shapes, objects, swirls, and abstract graphic marks!

Doodles help to clear your head, or expand your creative process... and actually, over time, help move an artist's style into new directions. One certainly cannot be bored while doodling. The doodles I have posted here are rather conservative images (edited for adult content!) ... because of the fact that I write and illustrate children's picture books (which have been translated into four languages). So, I have many young readers visiting my web site (to which my blog is linked), hence I must tone down anything appearing in my blog, too! 

Last word. Everyone should doodle. It's fun and therapeutic!

A Long Way to the Bottom? (aka: caught on the slope)

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Here is one of my recent e-mail promos I sent to AD's at newspapers, magazines and corporations... It is actually an illustration I did a handful of years ago (and subsequently was showcased in a "techniques" section of Step-by-Step magazine, discussing the simple Adobe Photoshop layers technique employed in placing the scanned stock report in the background of the image) and seemed relevant to the current state of our economic situation, wondering how much further all the financial indicators will fall, or if we have already reached the "bottom."

New Picture Book... “sketch-to-finish” stages

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Here are five sequential images (from one spread in Pantaloon), briefly showing the stages I must go through when bringing a picture book illustration to life. What is not shown are the multitude of preliminary character sketches of the baker I must go through between steps 1 and 2. 

See previous posts for more information regarding this new picture book, Pantaloon, created for Golden Books, and will be released in 2010. Roberta Ludlow/art director, Diane Muldrow/editor.