I’m surprised and honored to report that I am one of TeePublic’s Featured Artists/Designers for this week! I’ve kept a shop on TeePublic for several years for apparel, stickers and swag – it’s the closest thing that I have to a “side hustle” – but since it’s not a priority for me at this stage in my career, it’s really nice to get the attention from them for my work, culminating in a solo ad on their homepage this Saturday.
I’ll be adding a new design for purchase on Wednesday, and my whole shop is on sale all week! If you’re interested in grabbing anything: TeePublic Shop
BATMAN TEAM-UP COMIC
Page 3 is done!
In the next issue, I’ll include some more details, as well as Page 4 (created by my son!).
QUICK ILLUSTRATION UPDATE
Based on how far behind I am, my projected workload for the rest of the year, and my mid-year goal re-evaluation, I’ve decided to drop taking part in the Character Design Challenge every month as a goal. If a monthly prompt really grabs me, I’ll do it, but otherwise, I need to pour all of my effort into knocking out the projects I’ve already got piled up on my plate.
— Andrew
PS: Don’t forget to follow me on following socials:
Super short update today! I’ve made it through a family staycation, vacation, and Independence Day Weekend, and found just enough time to finish laying in the flat colors for the 3rd page of the Batman comic I’m making with my son:
Now that I’ve got some free time (especially with my kids out and about for most of the rest of the summer), I’m looking forward to going full time into Halloween project production – starting by finishing off a painting that’s been taunting me for at least a year.
— Andrew
PS: Don’t forget to follow me on following socials:
And I thought April was a blur… Turns out that animated project I was working on ended up consuming my life (work and personal) for about 3 weeks. Then,on the morning I delivered it to the client, I jumped on a plane (with 1.5 hours of sleep) and was out of town on a business trip for a week.
Poof. There went May.
Painful, but definitely a learning experience. For example:
I learned that I have 3 gears. I can continue to work ridiculously hard for a ridiculous amount of time, pushing through exhaustion levels for about a week to a week and a half, but then my body has to crash and get a full night’s sleep before starting the process again.
It’s absolutely not worth it. After spending pretty much the last month of the school year (the last year of elementary for my boys) not seeing my family outside of meal times (3 of those weeks with me actually being home, just locked in my home office), it was glaringly clear to me that better scheduling, planning, and client communication would have been way more effective. Extended crunch times do not work for a family man. I’ve worked pretty hard to get better at time and project management on the personal level – now I just need to force those healthy habits and boundaries into my professional life. Fingers crossed.
That being said, I’m extremely happy with the end product (and so was the client). Here’s the completed animation from my favorite sequence of the project:
COMIC PROJECTS UPDATE
That big animation project derailed my project calendar so thoroughly that the only way to get things back on track is to reschedule some projects. And the bigger the project, the bigger the delay.
Unfortunately, this means that I’ll need to push production on “Jupiter IX” to January 2025. This, of course, sucks, but is the right thing to do. It’s waited this long, so I’m not going to try to jam it into an unrealistic timeline. Plus, this will give my schedule the air to finish my Batman project with my son at a really high level, without having to drop any of the other great smaller projects I have lined up for the back half of 2024. He’s grown so much as an artist since finishing his last page – I’m extremely excited to see what comes next!
ILLUSTRATION UPDATE
I’m officially behind being behind on the Character Design Challenges. However, I did find the time to knock out my character sketch for the April theme, “Traveling Shepherd”:
This is more of an update on the Illustration/Art World at large, but since the last issue, pretty much everyone has lost all patience with Meta. This is because that company (which includes Facebook and Instagram) has decided that they have the right to train their proprietary AI on the artwork uploaded by users. Now, I definitely think that’s unethical, but I guess they technically have the right to do so on their platform, as long as they provide a way for artists to opt out of that feature. However, they’ve made it close to impossible for artists (especially in America) to opt out, so many have looked for an alternative. This includes me, but mostly because Instagram has stopped being in any way beneficial to me for at least a year.
This brings us to Cara, a new portfolio/social site for artists that is strongly anti-AI. I’ve set up an account there, and would really appreciate it if you are able to give me a follow: https://cara.app/ajillustrates
Time to get back on track! I’ll be using to June to finish a painting and making progress on my Gandalf sculpt, and to take a much needed staycation with my wife and kids. Can’t wait to spend more time with the work I care most about, and with the people that matter the most to me.
— Andrew
PS: Don’t forget to follow me on following socials:
April was an absolute blur. We’re in the busy season at my day job as a Creative Director, with multiple huge projects going on, and biggest of all, for me at least, is a new “sketch” animation project. This one’s a two minute video for an organization battling homelessness in New York, and the art direction is roughly “wood block illustrations of river-rafter within a Lewis & Clark era map” (because nothing can ever be easy, and I wouldn’t want it any other way). One of the fun wrinkles that I’ve cooked up for this one is to start with live-action shots of hands (my totally model-worthy hands) holding the map, and then we dive into it for nearly the full length of the video before pulling back out for logo and CTA recognition.
Here are some of my favorite screenshots so far:
ONGOING PROJECTS
BATMAN TEAM-UP COMIC
The inks are done for Page 3! I’ve still got some things to clean up digitally, but overally, I feel this is a big improvement on my previous page. I still don’t feel confident with the finality of laying in blacks, but I did push them a little bit with Bane.
So far, 3 out of the first 4 pages are complete, with cleanup and coloring my second page being my top priority this month. This has been my favorite project to work on for a long time, and I am loving seeing my son’s creativity grow!
The Character Design Challenge for March was “Animal Wuxia Warrior,” so I used that as an excuse to draw a version of the Grim Reaper that I’ve had in my head for the Land of the Dead. My Lord of Death is a cross between an angel and a raven, whose cloak morphs into black, feathered wings when he needs to fly. Whenever I get to a proper illustration of him, I’m looking forward to rendering his black armor, flecked and lined in gold.
My wife and I celebrated our 2nd Wedding Anniversary this month! Since the gift theme is “cotton,” and she loves hanging out at home in big, comfy sweatshirts, I decided to design her a college-style sweatshirt for her Hogwarts House, Slytherin (and, yes, all of this is exactly as geeky as it sounds).
Though her sweatshirt is one of a kind, you can snag apparel with my basilisk illustration at TeePublic.
By the next issue, I should be wrapped on the animation project, and I’ll be my creative energy and time will be freed up again to spread it around to my ongoing personal illustration and sculpture projects. See you then!
— Andrew
PS: Don’t forget to follow me on following socials:
I feel like I say this every year, but 2023 has to have been the fastest year ever. And not even in a “time is relative” kind of way, but more of a “hey, when did days start having 18 hours in them instead of 24” kind of way. Whatever the case (Science? The earth’s rotation? Trying to do too many things at once?), my 2023 was absolutely all over the place, to the point where I missed out on contributing to this blog after last January.
I mean to correct this oversight. I’ve spent the first 3 months of 2024 really focusing on time management and habit tracking, and I think I’ve gotten myself back into a good enough schedule that it’s time to get back to writing. So, let’s look at this post as sort of a soft reboot of the blog, and make it issue number 1 of “Monday Morning Illustrator.” Starting today, I’ll be posting a blog filled with project updates, both big and small, every other Monday. I’m shifting the focus of my art career onto larger projects, so this blog will be used primarily to document the progress I make as a chip away at some big things.
But first…
2023 REVIEW…
…In Illustration:
Hold the Cheese | Bad Apple #12GimliBowserPizza GhostMichelangelo
… in Sculpture:
For my wife’s 2023 valentine, I recreated our honeymoon snorkling trip at the coral reef off the coast of Key West.
… and in the Sketchbook:
Oh, and I also won some industry awards for animation. Two Communicator Awards of Excellence (Animation and Causes & Awareness), and one Silver Telly (Series: Animation). It’s always nice to have your work recognized, especially when it’s with a great team and for great clients. To date, I’m up to 5 Communicators and 4 Tellys, and I’m about to start work on a brand new animated video that I think has a shot for one in the future.
BIG PROJECTS
BATMAN TEAM-UP COMIC
Starting last summer, my son (10 years old at the time) and I decided that we wanted to collaborate on a fun project together. We quickly landed on the idea of making a bootleg, 8-page Batman comic. Each of us would be responsible for writing, penciling, inking, and lettering 4 pages (I took on the colorist job for all pages), making the story up as we went, handing off alternating pages.
Page 1 by Andrew JohnsonPage 2 by Theodore Johnson
So far, 3 out of the first 4 pages are complete, with cleanup and coloring my second page being my top priority this month. This has been my favorite project to work on for a long time, and I am loving seeing my son’s creativity grow!
Aside from being a blast to work on, the Batman project is also a warm-up for me as I slide into original comics creation. I’ve had an idea since at least 2009 for a science fiction story, and this summer I’m finally ready to begin production on the first chapter of what I hope will be a ~250 page graphic novel. So far, I’ve thumbnailed out that chapter (titled “Jupiter IX,” named after the space station at the heart of the action), and have begun to revisit the character designs.
In June, I’ll start ramping up toward production on that comic, so be on the lookout for this blog to launch as a newsletter in the summer that will track its development.
Outside of the big narrative projects, I want to keep myself on my toes with smaller art pieces. I’ve actually booked myself up on these throughout year, because I had so many projects that I wanted to jump onto last year, but ran out of time. Here’s how things are looking so far:
ILLUSTRATION UPDATE
One of my goals is to draw every day, and to do so, I’m making sure that I at least always have something to work on in my sketchbook. I’ll be using the monthly themes for the Character Design Challenge as inspiration throughout the year.
For January, I created a Death Rider for my Land of the Dead (“Dragon Postal Service” theme).
And for February, I put our family’s dog Kevin in a mech-suit to create a police K-9 unit for the world of Jupiter IX.
Broken Up About It | Bad Apple #13
As always, I took part in the For the Love of Kettle art exhibition/fundraiser for the Kettle Art Gallery in Dallas, Texas. This marks the 13th painting in my Bad Apples series. I’m not sure if I’m going to continue creating them for this event, of if I want to go into a different direction for 2025.
In January, I returned to a sculpt of Gandalf that had been sitting untouched in my closet for about a year and a half. I’m really enjoying working on it, and just got in some Cosclay to try out for the first time on it (so I can make flexible belts, hair, and fabric). Unfortunately, with everything else I’m working on, this one’s gotta be the palate-cleansing project that I’ll only be able to squeeze in an odd day here and there between bigger projects.
I try to make every valentine sculpt for my wife special, but this one definitely hits for me. It commemorates the first painting that she ever sold (from the 2023 For the Love of Kettle event), which was inspired by the storm of emotions after being laid off (along with all the other women from her department). Now that our family’s on the other side of that, I wanted to create an homage to that painting to celebrate her strength and spirit. Fun note: an empty high-heel is WAY harder to sculpt for me than a hand. That thing was for real the devil.
Andrew Johnson Illustrates 