Dave Heinrich
Dave Heinrich is an illustrator and graphic designer based in Adelaide, South Australia - probably best known for his work in publishing, particularly comicbook art, cartoons and caricatures. He has also worked as an artist in advertising, game design and webcam animation. Most recently he has been enjoying illustrating childrens’ books.
He first began freelancing as an illustrator in 1989, starting out in underground small-press comicbooks, and was then first published by Mad Magazine in 1991. Since then, Heinrich has gone onto work for the major American comicbook companies (Marvel, DC) on such titles as Batman and The Phantom. And over the years, Dave's strips and cartoons have appeared in such magazines as Mad, Live To Ride, Street Machine, Fast Fours, Penthouse and Picture.
He has also done illustration, storyboarding and presentation visuals for many advertising firms and production houses in Adelaide, South Australia and Sydney, New South Wales. While internationally, Heinrich has produced promotional art and storyboarding for clients in Japan and Greece.
In 2000, Heinrich moved from traditional illustration and graphic design into multimedia and web design, finding himself drawing for 2D Flash animation with Digital Artisan for the Threshold Entertainment webcam network out of Hollywood. He drew the cartoon serials "Where Are The Toons Now?"; a hollywood babylon-style parody of famous old cartoon characters, and "The Producer"; starring the voices of Tom Arnold and Jerry Springer. These cartoon serials were nominated for Pixie Awards (the Internet Oscars) in 2001. Soon after Dave designed characters for and illustrated the opening sequence of the Warlords: Dungeon and Warlords 4: Havoc's Gate Playstation projects respectively for SSG Gaming.
After completing a Masters in art history during a brief sojourn between 2001 and 2002, in 2003 Heinrich accepted a day-job as a web-designer at Optcom, an IT solutions bureau.
He continued to operate as an illustrator at home however, landing such advertising commissions as the celebrated gladiator poster for the 2004 Clipsal 500 V8 Supercar event and drawing the next installment of Dharma The Cat: "The Silk Road Adventures" written by David Lourie - virtually an illustrated history of Buddhism a la Asterix. Heinrich also continued to produce caricatures for KPMG and Westpac, along with Flash art for intranet and training CD-Rom applications with Where-U-Learn.
In 2005, Optcom was merged with sister business Inprint Design, a design studio and print brokerage situated at Flinders University where Dave soon found himself once again back in print design as well as developing for web. In 2007, Heinrich completed his first full colour children’s book “The Goblins Picnic” published around the world by Little Hare Books.
Heinrich eventually left Inprint Design in 2008, to take up a lecturing position in digital arts and web developing at Cambridge International College back in the city, but by April 2009 the Medical Illustration and Media unit of the Flinders Medical Centre had lured him back into practicioning.
Today, Heinrich is currently employed by the Flinders University at the hospital as the art director of the unit. He has never been more active in his home studio however, collaborating on multimedia illustrations for the stage screens of Australian hiphop act the Hilltop Hoods’ “State of the Art” world tour in late 2009.
In 2010 Heinrich began working as a concept artist for Melbourne independent filmmaker Robert Jukic’s “Sacrifice” project, as well as returning to comicbooks once again as a contributor to and designer of a new Australian anthology comicbook called “Decay”, published by DK Productions. He also continues to work on another new children’s book “The Ol' New Moon”, written by Port Lincoln fishing magnate Peter Tudorivic.
- Tyler Roland