Change of Pace

Attention everybody! 
I don't feel like posting the same thing on two separate blogs each week, so I am hereby moving my operation to tumblr (http://michaelhirshon.tumblr.com) because it's a lot more conducive to sharing and people seeing my work.

Please, I urge you all to follow me there instead! It will be the same content and it will look the exact same. You can put the RSS feed (http://michaelhirshon.tumblr.com/rss) into whatever blog aggregator you use -- if that's your thing.

This blogspot blog has been good to me these last 5 years, but it's time to make things a little bit more efficient. I really appreciate you following me all this time, and it would be great to see you again on the tumblr side!

http://michaelhirshon.tumblr.com 

Concussions

Here's a piece I did for the new Grantland Quarterly -- it seems like a sequel illustration to an illustration I did before, despite it being about a different sport. I think I'm their go-to concussion guy. Specifically, this article is about the NFL silencing a large amount of concern over safety with a large cash settlement. You can read Charles Pierce's article, here.  AD: Juliet Litman



And here are some sketches:

 

Flightless

Here's my fourth cover for Amazon's Day One publication. This illustration was for Flightless, by Keziah Weir, a story about an American couple, a meteorologist and a parrot researcher, living in New Zealand, trying to conceive a child.

 

Here are some sketches:

Martin Luther King Jr.

Here's a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. I did for Time Out New York; pretty straightforward.
AD: Kathryn Brazier

Paul Stuart

My work is currently displayed in the window of Paul Stuart (a high-end clothing store) in Manhattan, on Madison Ave and 45th. The company asked our class to re-imagine their classic J.C. Leyendecker mascot/logo and place him in a local environment. I chose to blow him up and put him on top of their store building.  Thanks to Moonsub Shin for the photo!

Rad Wallpaper

Finished out 2013 with a very fun assignment -- a commission to do a family portrait. Normally, doing a family portraits would sound terrible (likenesses, stuffy smiles, sweaters, etc), but in this case it sounded amazing. Phrases like "my head but with a robot body and koala ears", "the ghost of my dead cat", and "my baby riding my new cat like it's Falcor" made this a project that I couldn't pass up.

Highway with Green Apples

Here's my second cover for Amazon's Day One publication. The story, Highway With Green Apples, was written by Bae Suah, a Korean writer. It's about a directionless, twenty-something Korean girl who doesn't know what she wants out of life. My illustration depicts an incident where she buys some apples from a roadside vendor and imagines herself living out a simple, happy existence selling fruit. 

Some sketches: