IKEA Story Cards

Recently I teamed up fellow illustrator Denise Shimabukuro to create IKEA's "Lattjo Story Cards", a fun family product designed to encourage children and adults to invent creative and original stories.

The project, developed for IKEA by DreamWorks, features 20 wordless story cards with a variety of characters and settings as a fun way of engaging children in personal and unique story telling.

My role was to create a total of 27 detailed digital paintings in a traditional textured "acrylic" style, based on pencil drawings supplied by Denise. I'm very happy with the outcome! "Lattjo Story Cards" can be found on IKEA's site here!

DreamWorks and Dragons

Early in 2014, DreamWorks Animation approached me about illustrating some board books for their new publishing branch, DreamWorks Press. A few months after completing those, I was asked to work on a picture book adaptation of the original "How to Train Your Dragon" movie. It didn't take me long to say "Yes"! 

For those not familiar with the film, "How to Train Your Dragon" tells the story of a young Viking named Hiccup who befriends a rare and powerful dragon.

It was a pleasure to work with Art Director Mike Sund on this title, as well as co-illustrator Denise Shimabukuro. Denise provided the pencil drawings, and I created the final digital paintings. The direction was to create a hand-painted acrylic/gouache look, which I achieved with a variety of Photoshop brushes.

I'm very proud of the final product, a 32 page hardback book released in 2015. 

(Available on Amazon at http://tinyurl.com/q9zmt6r).