When I was in art school at CCA(C), I never quite fit in, artistically speaking. I had lots of friends, but since the classes I was taking were all fine art classes, I was sort of out of place. My work was always being called “illustrative” — a grave insult in the world of the fine art academy!

That's me in my art school days, looking scared of my own work.

Now I’m back in the academic world, doing a little teaching at the SF Art Institute, and just finished my first class, an introduction to illustration using digital tools. And I guess it’s appropriate that most of my students were people just like me — born illustrators working in an almost exclusively fine art-oriented school. Which, it turns out, is not such a bad place to be if you’re an illustrator!

To give them a sense of the “real world” of the working illustrator, I made each assignment a “job” from an art director — and for extra realism I attached an imaginary dollar amount tagged to each assignment. The students did a total of five jobs, ranging from editorial illustration to fashion illustration to my favorite assignment, the gig poster, which I saved for their final. They did some great work!

Read on to see some examples of their work… Click here to read more »