Artillery Recruiter

Prints Available on Society6.com

Recruiters, you love to hate em, but you wouldn’t have served without yours helping you along! I had a great recruiter when I joined: SSG White out of Manchester, NH Recruiting Station. Never BS’ed me about anything I was going to encounter.

This piece is for my old roommate from Iraq. Spent a lot of time on the route with him and he’s now recruiting outside of Baltimore.  This piece talks to both sides of his career, the Artillery Forward Observer and the man who is now helping young men and women start their own journeys.

I’m really pleased with how it turned out and it’s given me the idea to do other iconography from around the military. Hope you all dig it!

Inner Harbor and the Random Inspirations

A cold windy day at the Inner Harbor in Baltimore isn’t exactly my idea of a good time.  But when you have to make due with a crappy situation, you find inspiration (and warmth!) where you can.  In the case of a couple weeks back, Barnes and Noble gave the necessary warmth and coffee fix our splinter sketch group needed early in the day.

The result was a brief glimpse at mundane life.  I’m finding that book shelves and areas with a lot of them can make for some really effective background devices.  They’re not particularly hard to capture the feel of in a short amount of time either.

Not wanting to fight the cold, a couple of us headed up into the Baltimore World Trade to the observation deck.  It’s useful to find a new way to see an area, especially one as well traveled as the Inner Harbor.  This was our fourth or so trip to the area in a different context, and it was beginning to feel a little stale.  Getting up above it all helped me to find things I wanted to represent and the warmth to see it through.

The submarine and the last image came from our time up on the observation deck.  If anyone hasn’t seen it yet, there are a lot of artifacts/ruined pieces from the attacks on 9/11.  These have particularly profound impact on me each time I pass them as they represent a large chunk of my adult life that has been directly affected by that single day.  I found the wall you see in the image above on the observation deck amongst a few more pieces of broken stone and metal on display.  It shows a collection of portraits of people killed in the attacks that called Maryland home.

The Maryland Zoo in Baltimore

I can’t remember if I’ve ever been to a true zoo at any point in my childhood.  So the trip our group took to the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore was a pleasant surprise!  The idea was to go in, get a bunch of useful drawings and use those to produce a poster design for the zoo.  With that in mind I knew the animals would be the key and that environment would be less important.  Strong and complete looking drawings would allow me the most flexibility in creating something striking and simple.  I also knew I wanted to play up the strengths of my sketchbooks paper this time out.