Bill Mayer’s wonderfully energetic and delightfully loopy illustrations are flashes of pure visual hyperbole.

His intensely colorful and beautifully rendered animals, monsters and freaked-out people just about jump off the screen, eyes a-goggle and huge toothy grins as wide as their heads (if they have heads).

Mayer has a website with examples of his work in several categories, as well as extensive Flickr galleries, a presence on Drawger, a section on Behance Network, and a portfolio on the site of The Weber Group, his artist representatives.

You’ll have to go to the latter two for information about the artist and his clients, as his own site doesn’t have a bio or information page.

Mayer works in a variety of media and combinations of media, gouache, oil, airbrush, scratchboard, digital and I’m not sure what else.

He works for a variety of clients, including he United States Post Office, Coca Cola, DreamWorks, Blue Sky Studios, Cartoon Network, GameStop, Hasbro, Levi’s for Women, Jose Cuervo, Time Magazine, IBM, Delta Airlines, RJR Nabisco, Yupo Paper and Stueben Glass.

Mayer cites influences as diverse as Jack Davis, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Monet, Picasso and Boterro in the formation of his style. He studied at the Ringling School of Art in Florida, and is currently based in Decatur, Georgia.

Mayer is a friend and collaborator of Goñi Montes, who I recently profiled.

Freelance illustrator Goñi Montes works his fine line and color fill approach in a number of ways, creating a variety of emotional feeling and visual style.

Montes often makes use of a restrained color palette, limiting the range and value of his major colors, and offsetting them with dark but saturated colors in certain areas. He sometimes uses those dark but deeply saturated colors as his primary palette.

His subjects often seem to express surprise or alarm, adding to the edge of tension set up by the color range and subtle shifts in value.

Montes was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico and studied at the University of Poerto Rica at Mayagüez, later moving to Atalanta, Georgia and continuing his studies at the Savannah College of Art and Design. He now lives in nearby Decatur, Georgia and teaches classes at SCAD in addition to his freelance work.

His clients include The Washington Post, The Village Voice, Draft FCB, Puerto Rico Sea Grant, and Oz Magazine.

In addition to the portfolio on his website, you can find his work on Tor.com, Behance Network and Richard Solomon Artists Representative, where you will also find a description of his process.