Christmas is usually the busiest time of the year – not because of all the shopping and parties I have to do (I don’t) but because clients, wanting to use every last penny in their corporate budgets, end up asking me to do some project or other which I need to finish before the year is up. It’s also the time of the year that I’m commissioned to create art for various purposes.

Here, I was asked to create a family Christmas card, three by five inches, so I took my Letraset markers and came up with this:

Except oops! I didn’t ask enough questions, and it turned out that client wanted it to be in landscape format. So oh, fine, I’ll just add to the drawing:

But apparently, orange isn’t festive enough – or, I guess, Christmas-y enough – so I scanned the art into Photoshop and colored stuff in using my 3″ x 5″ Wacom Bamboo tablet and a very basic color palette.

Voila!

Shirt designs for Spiffy.ph, a screen-print-on-demand shirt company based in Manila.

Client Johnson and Johnson International’s Customer Development Division invited me to organize and design the exhibit for their innovation exhibit, showcasing the best and most innovative CD programs and strategies.

Tying the exhibit together was the notion that ideas can come from anywhere, and innovation can follow at any time. More importantly, innovation can be taught. And so, side by side with the showcase of CD innovation projects, we set up interactive materials that aim to develop key innovation skills and techniques such as lateral thinking, visualization, and provocation.

The exhibit ran from November 9 – 13, 2009.

The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories is a showcase of speculative fiction stories written by Filipinos, and to date has released half a dozen issues. I’ve provided layouts and design, as well as the occasional spot illustration, to the book since its second issue.

Here are two covers – the Chirstmas special (2007) featured cover art by Alex Sandoval, and the fourth issue (2008) by Eisner Award winner Lan Medina, with digital paints by Ruben de Vela.

Lyndon Gregorio has been creating Beerkada comic strips for around ten years now, and only just recently released his first graphic novel spinning off concepts from the successful comic strips. Go-Beerkada is his take on the Japanese sentai genre, infusing it with his trademark storytelling sensibilities. It was launched at Komikon 2009 and is currently available in stores, sporting logo design and wraparound cover art by yours truly, with coloring help from Ruben de Vela.

This is for a series of textbooks I designed, illustrated, and laid out for Ateneo de Manila University Press back in 2006. The idea was to design characters that will appear throughout the book, and will grow older as the textbook levels progress. Here’s what the characters look like in third grade (click on the images for a bigger view):

And here’s what they look like by the time they’re in sixth grade:

At the last Metro Comic Con, I released a flipbook project with Beerkada creator Lyndon Gregorio called Popcon. The idea was that I’d write a story for him to illustrate and vice-versa.

Now you can download the script, which opens with:

Wide panel showing an exterior shot of the convention area, which can either be similar to Bahay ng Alumni, or the hallways outside Megatrade Hall — your choice. There’s a long line of convention goers, some in costume, some carrying bags of comics they’re hoping to have signed. In the foreground, a prominently-placed sign welcomes people to “POPCON – Comic Book Convention 2009”

KAEL
Well, here we are…

For this story, I started drawing thumbnails of the story across eight pages, to make sure it can fit into the space I have. In the end, partly because I think it’s clearer than lengthy panel descriptions I wrote, and partly to make the story idiot-proof, I sent both script and thumbnails to the artist. Here’s the thumbnails as originally sketched out on Adobe Illustrator.

Earlier this year, I illustrated a set of posters for Krispy Kreme; the goal was to evoke the retro aesthetic that’s so closely associated with the brand. All were hand-drawn before being scanned and vectorized in Adobe Illustrator.

The past couple of years I’ve been designing a lot of book covers for Milflores Publishing, a Manila-based publisher that, to my mind, has a dedicated “mass education through commercial publication” mindset, releasing book after book of readable-but-no-less-intelligent essays and short fiction. Their web blog has a catalog of the books they’ve released, as well as bonus material like short fiction, essays, and lectures by publisher Antonio Hidalgo. Here are some of the cover work that I’ve done for them:

THE KING OF NOTHING TO DO by Luis Katigbak (2006)

This may be one of the first covers that I’ve done for them, and what you see above is the design study I made based on Luis’ drawings of a cow and robot. I forget where I first saw them, but I found them charming that I just had to draw them into the cover. But the publisher found it too obscure and in-jokey, I guess, and went for this instead:

LAUGH TRIP by Chris Martinez (2006)

Or, this may have been my first book cover for them instead. I’m not sure. My memory only goes as far back as 2007. I’m not even sure this book was from 2006!

The hand in the cover is my sister Eilyn’s. But I don’t get royalties for designing a book cover and so neither will she.

A-SIDE/ B-SIDE by Vlad Gonzales (2009)

I’ve designed a few more covers (about 1 or 2 books a year) for them, but this one is perhaps my favorite. For the cassette tape, I actually went out and bought one, unspooled the magnetic tape, and took a photo of it that I can trace on Adobe Illustrator. I had to rearrange the spool numerous times, to get the shape just right, a frustratingly deliberate attempt at making it look messy and chaotic while still able to accomodate the sparse, minimalist design of the cover.