I enjoyed this recent podcast interview with writer Emily Nussbaum on what she describes as the renaissance in children’s programming. As an artist in the business and a parent I was interested in what she had to say.

I had a great time working with my friend Eric Schweickert on this illustration for a local brewery. Eric wanted to have a painted illustration in a retro 60′s style. He spent a lot of time gathering reference and composing an image using vintage photographs. I simply went in and painted the image directly on top in Photoshop. The challenge was to try and give it a painted look without getting all Photoshoppy with it. I’ve never liked how Photoshop brushes look. No matter what you do they never feel like an actual brush made the marks. So I worked really hard to use a variety of scanned brushes and use them as stamps to build up the image with real brush strokes. I like how it turned out for the most part, I think it’s a technique that deserves more exploration. I really love commercial illustration from the 60s and 70s and have a ton of projects that can benefit from the technique. .