Rachael Ray Hot Dog Bracket

Last year, Every Day With Rachael Ray magazine asked Serious Eats (website I do the Hot Dog Of The Week illustrations for) to do a basketball-bracket style "best hot dog in the country" article and I was lucky enough to be a part of it.


While Serious Eats head honchos Ed Levine and Adam Kuban were in Arizona, Chicago, New York and the West Coast I was driving across the South hitting 5, 6, 7 hot dog joints a day. Along with eating and writing I also did a bunch of illustrations for the article, just published in this month's magazine.





You can check out the bracket here or grab the magazine but I wanted to post the full size paintings and bunch of stuff that they didn't use.






These quick napkin sketches (I did about 30 of them) were going to be photographed with some actual hot dogs but they ended up not being used.


Also not used was a bunch of lettering for the different sections of the article, a lot of which was fashioned after the awesome hand-painted signs at Angelo's Coney Island in Flint, Michigan. Check out my recent post on Angelo's for more photos.




Also some spot illustrations of "hot dog drink pairings" like Cheerwine with Pulliam's Slaw Dog and Moxie with a Flo's dog.

Much thanks to Serious Eats and everyone at Rachael Ray magazine. It was incredible to illustrate a story I had actually experienced and something I'd love to do again, whether it be hot dogs or something else entirely.

One of them is right

Another short "Said What?" comic, see the whole thing here.

Edited by Benn Ray of Atomic Books, these comics are based on overheard
conversations and appear once a week in Baltimore's free daily "B paper".

Check out the archives including lots of great ones by Noah Van Sciver and Jordan Jeffries.

inside the hot dog studio

So for a while there last year I was trying to do my weekly hot dog illustrations faster by doing black & white line art and coloring them in photoshop. Make time for comics and some non-hot dog related projects. But I couldn't shake it feeling like a shortcut and the art just didn't come out the same. Also none of them were really nice enough to make into prints.

Anyway I'm back to the old school putting my colors down with a brush instead of clicking a mouse. Takes a little longer but totally worth it in the long run. It feels like small parts of a larger project rather than just a throw away hacked out image.




I have about 20 of these to do in the next month between Serious Eats and other freelance projects. A couple of them aren't even hot dogs believe it or not!

More Food T Shirts

Two more Pennsylvania food T-shirt designs for therethere.com. Pierogies and hot dogs for Allentown and a big pile of fries for Pittsburgh where they put them on deli sandwiches or just in big piles at the "Dirty O".

Cheesesteak T-Shirts!

Just finished up this t-shirt design for therethere.com. A couple more on the way with iconic greasy foods of Pittsburgh and Allentown.

2010 Hot Dog Illustration Madness

Here's a bunch of hot dog related illustration I did in 2010 and haven't posted yet, including a poster for Farmer John (a Los Angeles meat company), a bunch of paintings for Fig Restaurant in Santa Monica (for their special summer hot dog menu) and some illustrations I was working on for an international hot dog place in South America (a project that sadly seems to have kicked the bucket).



These paintings were all meant for a hot dog restaurant in Brazil that never opened. The idea was international hot dogs with insane toppings, think Hot Doug's or Bark but riffing on European and South American hot dog styles rather than American. I had to translate everything to Portuguese which was pretty awesome. Really sad that this didn't work out- there was going to be 10 different dogs plus 10 smaller illos of the regions for packaging or whatever.

Foobooz East Passyunk Tote

Tote bag for Philly food blog Foobooz. They wanted a street scene of one of Philly's new "restaurant rows" and I went with East Passyunk since it's not only 4 blocks from my house but also an awesome mix of old south philly stuff and new hipster yuppie stuff (and people).

When I was shooting photos the guy in the butcher shop came out in his bloody apron and started screaming at me about insurance and lawyers or something. Awesome. Won't stop me from going there for some cheap chicken parts though.

It was tough to simplify it enough so that it would work for a screenprint, there's about 100 more places I wanted to jam in there - especially the amazing Patrick Nagel-esque King Of Jeans sign.


Head on over to Foobooz.com and pick one up or check out their new line of T-shirts. They're also now available at Green Aisle Grocery (1618 Passyunk Ave), 15 bucks a pop.