The Lovely Anna and I are in New York City this weekend to celebrate our 21st wedding anniversary (actually that’s not officially until Wednesday) and to see the Brendt Toast Gang’s art show featuring the work of a long time and very good friend, Ed Steckley.

Ed is a very talented illustrator and cartoonist, as well as being one of the best live caricaturists I have ever seen… and that’s saying something as I have seen some thousands of them. He does a lot of storyboard work for commercials that you have probably seen on TV, as well as publication work including a piece in MAD some years back. For the show he did six beautifully painted watercolors of classic pin up girls but drawn in his distinctive half caricature/half realistic style. Ed was a manager for me for many years in my Six Flags parks in Missouri and in Massachusetts, and started drawing caricatures for me at Valleyfair in 1992… so we go a ways back.

Ed just launched a revamp of his website the other day, which is well worth the visit. It’s got a great, retro garage theme and some fun flash animations (without being flash heavy) and of course is chock full of terrific artwork. He even has a blog now, which I’m looking forward to following to keep uop with his latest antics.. uh… work.

So, go visit Ed’s new website via one of the links above or on my blogroll under “Usual Gang of Idiots”.

Click for a closer look…

Several months ago I did a little side project for a couple of enterpenuers who were designing and building a poker play website. They wanted a more fun, humorous and cartoony environment and feel to the game than your typical video game looking sites. The results are now online at www.5PMPoker.com.

The project was pretty involved. First I needed to design a playing environment that would be fun and unique, but would also work within the dimensions they needed. They wanted some silly animations that would either randomly move or move when some goal or event happened in the game. We did a lot of brainstorming and they settled on an old attic room: (more…)