On Saturday night, September 27th, Pleasure Island in Orlando opened it’s doors for the last time. Today Pleasure Island is no more.

It’s sad to see it close down. I have a lot of great memories of PI. In fact, when I first moved to Central Florida, this is where my brother’s took me to hang out. After years of not really spending time with my brothers since I was always hanging out with my older friends, my brothers and I reconnected while in Central Florida. We were all in our early 20s and were regulars at PI, dancing and drinking almost every night for a few months. What a blast!!!

At the time I had also gone through a bad break up so going out every night to dance and drink with my brothers and friends was a great way for me to get back on my feet. For the first time I enjoyed being single.

On Saturday night, my buddy called and asked me if I wanted to go one more time. Of course I said yes. So I joined him and his lovely wife for one more visit before PI closed its doors and becomes yet another slew of shops.

We hit the Adventurers Club first. I brought my sketchbook with me and was able to capture a quick sketch of Colonel Critchlow Suchbench (Click to enlarge). This is my last tangible memento of Pleasure Island (It’s still a work in progress). The piece is actually a sketch, but I scanned it and brought it into Painter.

Like I said, since the FWC aren’t going to use any of the first 4 prelims I did for their logo, I will be painting the turtles instead.

Here’s the first of 4. This is still a work in progress. Click to enlarge.

I’m happy to announce that the logo I illustrated and designed last year for the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission was received so well that they’ve asked me to do next year’s logo. So of course I’m stoked.

Here are the 5 turtle illustrations that I will be working with. The 5th is actually the only concept that is much more fully developed, although it still needs some refining. Each turtle will have several variations but one from each core concept will be chosen. Basically they’ll end up with 5 choices from the plethora of ideas my head has spit out.

Once I have the 5 fleshed out logo concepts, I’ll post them and of course I will post the final logo as well.

Click on any of the images below to enlarge.

Update: I won’t be working on 5 concepts. They’ve already chosen to go with concept 5.  It’s the only logo where I’ve applied the theme, which will be disclosed later on. As for the other 4 drawings, I’m going to turn them into paintings.

I was thinking of what to draw last night, while I watched a half hour promo of the making of Tropic Thunder. They were interviewing Jack Black and I thought, “Hmmm, I can pause the TV and draw him.” So I did. Click on the image to enlarge.