Riding dragons, doodling the flu.

For the last three years now, I've been joining a supremely talented group of artists and designers who work in the fantasy genre. By som strange bout of luck, I became the token editorial dude among a crowd of folk who spend weeks making chain mail and dragonscales look incredible.

Among some of the crew are Tor Books art director Irene Gallo, my buddy and ridiculously talented painter Greg Manchess, fantasy art legends Julie Bell & Boris Vallejo (Boris is still the only artist I've met that I kinda mumbled "holy crap I collected your trading cards" when I met him), and fan favorite Dan Dos Santos.

Other regulars and visitors include Arkady Roytman, Scott Fischer, Jon Foster, Dave Seeley, Lars Grant-West, Eric Fortune, Anthony Palumbo, David Palumbo, Ben Foster and Rebecca Guay.

While there, I got a very quick turn around commission for the AARP Bulletin website. So, I spent Monday night drawing the letters F, L, and U lurking in a scary environment (as Eric Seidman at AARP described it "...if you let mold run wild in a closet for 20 years").

Being a tight deadline (10am, the following morning), he requested the letters be a bit more scary and dark, then let me go to finish.
Eric thought it was a bit too "inside of my uncle's stomach" for the readership of AARP and I needed to do it again. I was game, what's my new deadline? "2 hours." Cue me running to my desk.
I'd say it was a pretty good hustle.

Unfortunately I forgot my camera for the week, but here are some links to Irene and Julie & Boris's blogs and flickr pages. Enjoy.

Irene's entry, Irene's Flickr.
Julie and Boris 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.