Our Spring fashion editorial ‘Whites on White’ (working title) lead us to the Bliss Spa at the W Boston. This is one of the cooler locations we have shot at because the floor to ceiling windows gave us a lot of natural light to work with.

I was hired by Promo Labs to create a mural at the 2011 PPAI Expo in Las Vegas. The concept was to feature 12 ‘Industry Leaders’ that they choose and inspirational words of wisdom from each honoree. The mural was created over the coarse of 3 days.

Preliminary Portrait and Mural Concept Sketches

Unused Sketches for Second Concept

Ahhh, it’s that time again. I know I say it just about every year, but I cannot believe the holiday season has arrived so quickly. It seems like just a few days ago we were shooting the summer’s hottest swimsuits and eating lobster rolls down at the marina. The hot days and even steamier nights will be back again before we know it, but in the meantime let’s try to endure (err…enjoy) another New England winter.

In this issue we decided to ease the stress of holiday shopping by offering you over 30 of our favorite gift ideas for everyone on your list. Yes, some of our ideas are a bit out of our budget, but hey, we can all dream. If it’s your turn to do the hosting this Christmas, take a look at our recipe section, where eight of the city’s most talked about chefs shared childhood recipes that will have your guests begging for more.

We visited Towne Stove and Spirits and Caffe Nuovo – two of Boston’s newest restaurants – and were blown away by everything from the décor (sleek and modern at the North End’s Caffe Nuovo, and over-the-top extravagant at Towne) to the diverse and delicious menus. I cannot wait to revisit both of these spots in the summer, when giant open-air windows and roof deck seating will be in full effect.

Our fashion feature brought us to one of the greatest gems in the city, the magical Wang Theatre, where we showcased the season’s most elegant dresses and jewels in a setting fit for a king. I am also especially excited about the cover of this issue. We brought back Scene Magazine’s original cover model, Devon Diep, to grace the cover once again, and she still looks just as amazing as she did back in 2003.

Scene Boston Magazine has gone through a lot of changes over the years. I wanted to bring our publication into the twenty-first century and host our content online. I was able to convince my boss to scrap our old site and build a new one in WordPress so we could publish our wonderful content more efficiently. In just 6 months our site has seen over 20,000 visitors with over 50,000 page views. View Page

Scene Boston Holiday Issue 2010 Features

When I made this poster I did not know much about Benazir Bhutto. The media proclaimed she was a “martyred democrat” from Pakistan, but as a man who is always skeptical of anything said in the main stream media, I had to see what the other side of the story could be.

Today, Benazir is being hailed as a martyr for freedom and democracy, but far from being a natural democrat, in many ways, Benazir was the person who brought Pakistan’s strange variety of democracy, really a form of ‘elective feudalism’, into disrepute and who helped fuel the current, apparently unstoppable, growth of the Islamists. During her first 20-month premiership, astonishingly, she failed to pass a single piece of major legislation. Amnesty International accused her government of having one of the world’s worst records of custodial deaths, killings and torture.

Within her party, she declared herself the lifetime president of the PPP and refused to let her brother Murtaza challenge her. When he persisted in doing so, he ended up shot dead in highly suspicious circumstances outside the family home. Murtaza’s wife Ghinwa and his daughter Fatima, as well as Benazir’s mother, all firmly believed that Benazir gave the order to have him killed. — William Dalrymple

It is impossible to draw a clear conclusion on which theory to side with. Bhutto started out as a symbol of the people, but over the years, was a supporter of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. I wanted to create a poster as a tribute to her life that included mixed metaphors about her motives. The stained glass windows and golden halo are Catholic imagery and hidden in the center is the Eye of Providence that was adopted as part of the symbolism on the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States.

I ended up printing 7 layers of ink on the poster. ( Yellow, red, blue, green, black, gold and a transparent layer to make the gold burst! ) After stepping away from the print I realized the lack of a mid-tone in the window was causing Benazir to appear flat. I went back into the print with a light gray water based marker to help push the background back and the figure forward.

My concept for this poster was to take two juxtaposing images, a terrorist & the seal of the U.S. Marines, and combine that with two contrasting words, freedom & filthy, but the ultimate goal of this poster was a simple experiment with color. The assignment was to use transparent overlapping inks to create the widest spectrum of colors possible. With only 4 colors printed, I was able to achieve 8 total colors in the final print.

Final digital sketch of overlapping colors concept

First layer of ink drying in the rack.

My friends, the Woods family, asked me to paint something fresh in the garage of their summer home. I have spent a couple of weekends up there prior to this trip and was excited to return! The house has all the cabin accoutrements, including tons of craft that say “Welcome to the Woods”. The irony of the sign playing on their last name was certainly the best concept for my old English style lettering I wanted to rock at the time.

My sketch I painted the style from.

I even transformed the style into a vector graphic.

To be totally honest with you, BostonFoodRules.com has very little ‘design’ put into it. It currently serves as a place to host my food photography portfolio and share my experiences in the Boston culinary scene with the world. In the future I hope to expand the site and develop the aesthetics further.

The internet is an amazing thing. It’s gift is that it contains an unbelievable amount of useful information, but it’s curse is that there is so much web junk. Utterly useless trash. That’s where DailyFreshProduce.com comes in. We hope to give you our edited version of the stuff we find while sifting threw everything the web has to offer. From great works of art to the best nut shot videos.

Party Animals started as a project for a packaging class, so the brands concept was built fast and furiously. My dude Adam Brink had some really great illustrations of monkeys in suits around the office water cooler and I knew he was the perfect man to see for an illustration of a monkey who took his drinking seriously!