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Hello.
I'm Mike Stanfill and I've been a freelance commercial
illustrator since the day I left the sheltering arms of
my old college dorm, so there are a lot of illustrations under
this ever-widening belt. This page offers a selection of my
sentimental favorites and you can see larger, more detailed
versions, by clicking on the little thumbnails to the left.
It's a technique I invented myself and I think it just might
catch on. <g>
Incidentally, the self-portrait to your left was my first digital
artwork, circa 1987, created for my TI99/4A user group. Click
my handsome mug for the whole rogues gallery. |
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The
Accumulated Rowing News Illustrations
I've been contributing editorial illustrations to Rowing News
Magazine for the past couple of years so I have quite the collection
of them now. So rather than bloat this page with a ton of thumbnails
for this artwork I'm going to bloat a separate page entirely.
Click the icon to the left for a comparative look at my editorial
craft for the rowing set. |
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Under
the Hood. Adobe Illustrator.
Covenant Design assigned me the task of developing a high-definition
rendering of a typical air-conditioning system, with particular
emphasis on the compressor. Gee, wonder why they asked me to
do this job? Could it have been THE PICTURE BELOW? (And it was!)
Contrast and compare. |
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Compressor. Adobe
Illustrator.
Black Swan Graphics had a problem. Their client, an air-conditioning
compressor manufacturer, needed a beauty shot of their latest
design. Trouble was, the CAD-CAM programs they were using didn't
export a very attractive image so they hired me to re-imagine
the item as best I could. Lucky for me, I was supplied with
a sample or two of the compressor that had already been sliced
into sections. |
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Zero
Gravity Toybox. Airbrush and acrylic
paints.
No matter how much commercial artwork I crank out it always
benefits me to occasionally whip up something out of whole cloth
to show art directors I'm capable of drawing something other
that stainless steel widgets. This flight of fancy was as much
an exercise in color as anything else. |
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Arresting
Graphics. Pen & Ink,
airbrush, acrylic paints.
An advertising agency asked me to develop a series
of images to be used as promotional devices for their
services. This was
my favorite of the bunch as I really liked how the little characters
came out, especially the poor little "pencil pusher". |
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Airborne. Dyes on cold-press board.
The illustration biz is a funny one. To be successful you
have to spend thousands of dollars to buy pages in commercial
art
books to display your talents to art directors everywhere.
In this case, the AD opened such a book, pointed to a work
of art
and asked me if I could ape this artists style. I said "Sure".
This is the result. |
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U
R Z 1 4 Me! Pen & Ink,
airbrush, acrylic paints.
This was another is a long string of self-promotional
illustrations. I had an agent at the time who had a toddler
to take care of so this was aimed to tweak her maternal instincts.
If you read the blocks correctly they spell out "I M Z
1 4 U". I am quite the wacky human. |
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Boomerang. Adobe
Illustrator.
This curious little illustration graced a brochure for
a banking concern. The headline was something like "Our clients always
come back." It was fun drawing the little characters in
these contorted shapes. |
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Battletech:
Armed Conflict. Pen & Ink
on hot-press board.
Back in my "waiting for the divorce to end" days
I got involved in a table-top war game called "Battletech".
It was a great deal of fun sitting around with the other
geeks
and blasting the crud out of one another. This illustration
was done strictly for grins for a B-tech fanzine. |
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Jumpin'. Pen & ink,
acrylic paints.
This image was used as a promotional mail-out for a bank
but I've totally forgotten which bank or what the body
copy says.
I just enjoy it for what it is although I'm surprised the client
let me get away with green-colored checkers. But black
checkers
would have been just so "blah!". |
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Rushing
For Snacks. Pen & Ink,
acrylic paint.
An ad agency working with Frito-Lay
commissioned this image. They'd originally hired another illustrator
for the assignment but weren't entirely pleased with the result
so they passed it on to me to completely rethink the image over
the Labor Day weekend. Look closely because that's not a football
the runner is protecting. |
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Laminate
How-To. Adobe Illustrator
The client manufactured commercial lamination
materials and they were understandably eager to make sure
that it was applied with as little fuss as possible, which
is
precisely why they had me illustrate the process. I rather
enjoy these "how-to" assignments. |
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Hey!
Over Here! Adobe Photoshop, pen and ink.
My client, The Newsletter Company, wanted a "New York Times"
sort of illustration for a promo piece they were mailing out.
Being a longtime Apple user I just had to put a little "iMac" character
into the little desktop computer. |
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Gears. Adobe
Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop.
A sentimental favorite of mine as this was the first professional-quality
work of art I created with a Macintosh, a 60mhz 6100 PowerPC,
using my all-time favorite software program, Adobe Illustrator.
It's 3-D appearance was all done the hard way, one polygon at
a time. |
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RoadRail. Pen
and ink, acrylic paints.
I have a client who has used my services since almost the very
day I got into the art business. His company started off small
and eventually grew to national proportions, and to illustrate
this he commissioned the work you see here. The original drawing
was well over two feet wide and contained more cross-hatched
ink lines than I care to think about. |
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Ballboys
Vs. the RedSquares. Pen and ink, acrylic
paint.
Another self-promotional work done in my pre-Mac days, illustrating
a somewhat twisted view of the Dallas
Cowboys- Washington
Redskins football rivalry. I later translated the image
into digital format using Illustrator and then converted it
into an animated GIF. The ball hung in space turning the prettiest
little spiral you ever did see. |
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Mike Stanfill, Private Hand - 2330 Jonesboro - Dallas, TX 75228 - 214-320-2293 |
