Illustration work rooted in a hands-on production background — cutting amberlith and inking with a Rapidograph before Macs existed, then years of fixing client-supplied "magic marker and toilet paper" artwork into clean color separations at Classic Imprint. That print-production discipline carries into vector work built today in Illustrator, alongside photo-based illustration and manipulation in Photoshop.
Two design directions developed from the same concept for a pre-print apparel line — built before print-on-demand existed, when a design had to earn its inventory. The plain version targets a broader, lighter-edge customer; the skull variant was developed for an older, more veteran-leaning buyer — mid-30s, bearded, tattooed — who wants something darker and more serious. Only some concepts in a line like this get produced; knowing which ones to build out is part of the job.
The plain design, applied as a left-chest placement.
A "spot drawing" — simple by design, built to show clean construction of a modified cylinder and a chain rendered from paths and patterns in Illustrator.
Poster design built from a candid street photograph, reworked through filters and liquify into an illustrative Halloween concert flyer.
A candid photograph, radically reworked in Photoshop into an invented character for an event poster.
The main portrait was built through a traditional digital caricature process: a high-resolution source photo pushed to heavy contrast so Photoshop's Cutout and Poster Edges filters would read cleanly, then distorted and exaggerated in Liquify, run through Illustrator's auto-trace to break the tones into flat spot colors, and refined back in Photoshop. The frames below extend that same portrait into motion — synthesized as video with Grok Imagine and captured as stills in Premiere, exploring how the original illustration could move and perform.
A spot-illustration portrait developed from a photograph, built as an icon for the Para Bellum Designs email signature — inked in the same disciplined line style described above, with the subject's own Para Bellum T-shirt rendered directly into the piece.