I can’t believe it! Reading and writing actually paid off!
Matt Groening

The Toledo/Lucas County Ohio library system has an impressive and varied offering of services for people living in the area. As part of their campaign to reach out and inform the community, they wanted to create a series which would promote some of those features to the public in a brochure, using a theme of “Taking You Places.” As is so often the case, the finished art would have multiple uses as well, from hand held pieces to posters. The art would utilize photographs, taken in various Toledo/Lucas library branch outlets, with illustrations that I would create digitally. Each spread would have its own theme, and the illustration approach had to be appropriate to that particular setting. This meant that the illustration style had to vary from a whimsical storybook feel to a more realistic one while maintaining a “family” look. The wild card of the whole project, was that each illustration had to work within the confines afforded by the selected photograph, (which might itself change, as it was corrected for things like lens distortion), and I was often left with a very oddly shaped live area. The solution was to work very closely with the art director, relaying composited images back and forth in the pencil stage, in order to achieve the client’s desired result.

The image above was used as the cover piece, the ones that follow are two of the interior pieces.





“Inspire Business Innovation”. The Toledo area is fast becoming known for the many businesses working on solar technology development, something the client wanted to emphasize in the artwork.