The Naked Silo

Finally: two examples of how my watercolour paintings of Abraham Lincoln and the two historic steam trains ( discussed back in February ) turned out on the printed material Union Pacific used to promote Lincoln's Bicentennial and his involvement with uniting the country through the railway. The top card is about 8.5" x 5" and there's nothing printed on the back. The bottom card (7" x 3") has the same Lincoln painting on the front as the top one, but with no text. Seen here is the back of the card with my painting(s) of the steam engines. There was also a 17" x 10" poster printed with Abe on the front (vertically) and the trains on the back (horizontally and much bigger, showing off the great details). The top card has a white border, as does the back of the bottom one, but the Abe image on the other side of the bottom card (not pictured) goes right to the edges. To ensure those great details on the trains, I painted them and the background for the...

11" x 8.5", pencil, 2009 All that talk about not sleeping to do those Abraham Lincoln illustrations for Union Pacific's celebration of his bicentennial from a commission by Bailey Lauerman , and only now am I getting around to an image-based post about it. The client, UP, wanted more of a profile than I had originally drawn (and painted, as per my original instructions) and this is what I offered. As I was preparing the email to send this new drawing, I had a brainstorm that maybe it'd look pretty cool if he had his left hand on his lapel in a classic Lincoln pose. So I very quickly Photoshopped a version like that using elements of this one (below). The hand-on-lapel variation was approved, and you can see the final illustration, with the finished, new version of Abe Photoshopped over the previous ones' background here . I also did the two steam engines that appear on the home page and the old-style decorative motifs that appear at the bottom of various pages. T...