The Art of Zachary Ford

Germ Warfare

This is a vector illustration that I did for an article about the flu virus. It's that time of year when people either get their shots, or they don't, and the point of the article was to denounce any myths about the flu vaccine. Each figure: the flu virus, the antibody, and the syringe were all used on little diagrams, so what you see is not the final product, just how I laid out the pieces on the art-board.

Going Green

This is a design for a sticker that gets used on all of the recycling bins around the hospital I work at. It was pretty open-ended with what I could do, so I had fun and did some poppy, eye-catching illustrations with some bright copy to accompany it. What could have been a pretty boring, standard recycling project turned out to be a fun item to work on.

Rapid Access

It's been a very long time since I've put anything new up on this blog. The reason being that I took on a design position at a hospital in St. Louis, it's been a hectic transition in my life to jump in full speed to the working world. I have also been pushing my entertainment (do I call it that?) company, Exaggerated Ink! very hard with my girlfriend and her father, who are partners with me in this endeavor. We have been in talks and meetings with Busch Stadium these past couple months to put on something very exciting for us there this summer. While we have to stay hushed about the details we expect this to be a very fast-paced ride that should continue to grow very rapidly over the next few years.

With all of that said, here are a couple of logo comps for an emergency information/transport group that is part of our hospital system. They had an old 'look' already, but nothing that looked like it ever had any real thought put into it. I think the top one is the better of the two, but an official decision has yet to be made, so I'll just have to wait and see what happens.

Eez-a-me! A-Mario!

It's a little bit late from Halloween, but I'm usually about two weeks late on all of my posts, so I guess I'm actually right on time. Rachel and I were Princess Peach and Mario for Halloween, featuring our friend Greg as Luigi!

Rachel Again!

I got the stink-eye for this one.

Alton Illinois Middle School Presentation

Yesterday I gave a presentation to Mrs. Owca's 8th grade class at Alton Middle School in Illinois. The students seemed to have a great time and asked a lot of smart questions that I normally wouldn't expect from that age group.

Mrs. Owca invited me to present this as a conjoining lesson with her ongoing study of the story, "Alice in Wonderland;" making a connection with exaggeration between caricatures and the exaggerated characters from the story.

The students there were very polite, bright, and in my brief sitting with them, very engaged in learning. Thanks for the good time guys!

Ryan...try to keep an eye on that drooling problem!

Artists Guild Presentation

Thanks to everyone who made it out to the gathering on Tuesday at the Saint Louis Artists Guild. I enjoyed speaking on the art of caricature and learned a lot that even I didn't know about many historical caricature artists. I hope that it was an informative engagement that everyone was able to take something from.

For everyone that wasn't there, myself and Ryan Roe, along with the help of Jeremy Townsend and Mary Daily went through the history of caricature from the time of Da Vinci and Monet, all the way up to O'Keefe and Kruger. We also discussed the National Caricaturist Network, the upcoming Saint Louis Mini-Convention, and went through some examples of our own works. In conclusion we gave a brief "caricature 101" course, and then drew live demos! What we hoped to stretch out for 30 minutes ended up lasting for 2 full hours. We had a good turnout and a wonderfully engaged audience. Also, thanks to Bill Vann for inviting me to do this.

More From L.A.

Here are the last two drawings I did at Universal Studios in California. It took me all day to loosen up and start having fun, but when I did, the crowd noticed and I had a line of people waiting for me to draw them, unfortunately it was past closing time and I had to cut out.