Design/Illustration — Martystuff

2-D Commercial Work

I love designing and illustrating. Over the years I've made countless pieces supporting my own work and that of others.

Both my design style and my illustration style are distinct. While I have been hired for many more straight-forward design pieces in the past, these days I mostly hire out for folks who are looking for my particular look and feel, and hopefully this page will give you a sense of what I mean.

Please get in touch if you are curious about availability and rates.

Design

The previous piece and this one are good examples of my print design style, which is most often seen as concert posters. Making use of digital collage, I utilize repeated imagery, mostly old-timey etchings, to create dense and visually-engaging fields and forms for information to sit in and interact with.

I pull this imagery from a large private database of copyright-free visual iconography.

In this context, as a designer I am still first and foremost committed to getting ideas and information across.

Illustration

My illustration style, when left to its own devices, tends more towards an idiosyncratic simplicity.

I love to draw, and sometimes my doodles do get intricate like my designs (see The Power Patterns), but on the odd occasions that I'm hired out as an illustrator, the results tend to land more toward the simple.

Pictured here is a comic strip commissioned for Barnes and Nobles' Sparknotes blog. I executed the illustration and the concept for the piece, one of several "Back to School Outfit Fails" from 2013.

In a promotional postcard for my the book party celebrating my first book, "Sock Puppet Madness," you see inklings of a union of the ornate poster design style with that of my idiosyncratic illustration style.

Here, I was commissioned to make a simple Save the Date wedding coaster (2014) and you can see another implied fusion of the ornate poster design style with that of the idiosyncratic illustration style.

Here my illustration of "The Magician Detective" fuses with another design-style I love to play in - that of aping and co-opting an iconic look and feel - often a nostalgic one.

Here I've taken the classic backs from GI Joe's 1980's action figures and fused my own creations, "The Lava Men," with them.

This piece was one of over a dozen created in the same style in support of Uncle Monsterface's 2014 album, "Rise of the Lava Men."

Another example of a co-opted icon, here I've merged my original creation, Uncle Monsterface into the style of the original Super Mario Brothers Nintendo cartridge for an album dedicated to Nintendo.

What follows are several more examples of posters and illustrations that I've worked on over the years.

If you have any questions or are interested in hiring me for design/illustration, please contact me.

Pictured here in this 2009 concert poster for Math the Band, I've dropped some of my persistent love of symettry in favor of a strange and other-worldly implied narrative featuring some characters from Professor Hero's Old Timey Automatons.