Dahn Yoga Illustrations

If you read my last post, then you'd know my very first freelance gig was for a magazine titled "Body & Brain", which is produced by Dahn Yoga. I figured this would be a one-time fluke, being that I didn't have a very large (or impressive for that matter) portfolio and I was still in college. At the time I had been running Six AM Comics with my friend Kevin and we had an email account set up at sixamcomics@hotmail.com... we rarely kept up with this email and most of the time forgot it existed. There was a rule at the time (may still be) that if you didn't have any activity on your hotmail account for three months, they would deactivate it... so every three months we'd sign in and send out a generic email to ourselves to keep it active (we didn't think anyone was actually going to the site).

Imagine my surprise when I signed in to this account and found an email there waiting for me. Apparently a woman with the Dahn Yoga group saw my illustrations in Body & Brain magazine and was impressed enough to ask for my services with a video they were preparing for one of their training camps. It must have just been dumb luck that she would have sent that email at the end of the right three months when I was checking it; a week later and she'd have been out of luck... or I'd have been out of luck depending on how you look at it...

I'm not quite clear anymore on the details of this job (again, 2005), but there was a video about the stages of life, not young and old, but graduating High School, falling in love, partying in college, etc... They asked me to create an image for each of these stages which they would display in this video at the appropriate times.

At this point I had some time to refine the style I played around with for the Body & Brain gig (which was evolving into whatever style some consider me to have now). I had these finished up in a couple of days, it was a pretty tight deadline, which is a good thing because it forced me to draw faster and more efficiently.

The downside to this job was that I spent so much time in front of the computer working on these that I had to start cracking my wrist every three minutes, an unfortunate habit which I still have today... so I guess you can say Dahn Yoga gave me Carpal Tunnel... inner healing my right wrist! Actually, I probably shouldn't slander the people who jump-started my career and gave me a worth-while portfolio... They were actually some of the most polite people I've ever worked with, and as I stated in the last blog, Jo Badger was the most talented designer I've ever known... ever.

Yoga!
~ Mark