Freelance Illustrator & Graphic Recorder — Cleveland, OH
Len Peralta is an award-winning creative with work appearing inThe New Yorker, CNN, Discovery Channel, Warner Bros., Steve Jackson Games, and Boom! Studios. Drawing monsters, geeks, heroes, and everything in between — by hand, with intention, for over three decades.
ABOUT LEN
Cleveland's Art Gun for Hire
Len Peralta is a Cleveland-area illustrator, cartoonist, graphic recorder, and all-around creative force with over 30 years of professional work spanning editorial illustration, game design, comic books, children's books, live graphic recording, and everything in between.
You can find Len Peralta's quirky, offbeat style in comic books, card games, on t-shirts, posters, and scattered across the internet like the world's most charming digital invasive species. He's worked with Discovery Channel, Warner Bros., Steve Jackson Games, Boom! Studios, Rifftrax, and Noggin, and illustrated books with folks like MST3K's Trace Beaulieu and Rifftrax's Bill Corbett. His graphic novel series Exterminite (with Mikey Neumann and Kris Straub) was flagged as a hot Hollywood property, which is the nicest thing anyone has ever said about anything he's made.
His work has appeared on CNN, The New Yorker, and at gallery exhibitions in Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Hawaii, and San Diego Comic-Con. Wired Magazine once called him one of the Top 100 Geeks to Follow, a title he still mentions at every possible opportunity.
Len is a working artist - emphasis on working, emphasis on artist - and a vocal advocate for human-made art in an age when "good enough and free" is starting to eat the table. Every piece is hand-drawn, hand-imagined, and made the slow way on purpose. He teaches digital art, comics, and graphic design at the Cleveland Institute of Art, serves as Lead Graphic Recorder for The Sketch Effect, and draws a live original illustration every week on Tom Merritt's Daily Tech News Show, which is either performance art or just his Thursday.
He's been podcasting since 2005 with Jawbone Radio - one of the first podcasts in the country - because apparently he has never once thought "this is probably enough." He lives in suburban Cleveland with his wife Nora. He's hirable, easy to work with (he promises), and would genuinely love to make something with actual human hands for your next project.
Contact: E-mail
Support Human Art
Look, nobody's saying AI isn't impressive. But impressive and meaningful are different things, and the difference lives somewhere in the 3am decisions an artist makes when no algorithm is watching. Supporting human art isn't nostalgia. It's a preference for the thing that still has a person behind it.
Generative AI is producing millions of images a day. Some of it is clever. None of it has a story behind it. No late nights. No paper napkin sketches. No moment where something clicks and you draw the thing you didn't know you were trying to draw.
I've been drawing for over 30 years. I've drawn to pay hospital bills. I've drawn trading cards of geeks I admired. I've drawn live on stage at nerd festivals. I've drawn characters for games my kids play.
Every piece on this site was made by a person (me) with a stylus, a pen, and a brain full of references no algorithm has ever had.
When you commission art from me, you're not getting an output. You're getting a collaboration with someone who has spent two decades figuring out how to put something on a screen that stops you in your tracks.
That's worth something. And I'll fight for it.
WHAT I DO
How I Can Help
Commission An Illustration
Custom portraits, characters, book covers, editorial pieces, D&D characters, monsters, mascots. If you can imagine it, I can draw it. Every commission ships with a certificate of human-made origin.
Game & Character Design
Card games, board games, RPG illustration, character design, and world-building art. Track record with Steve Jackson Games, AdMagic/Breaking Games, and Boom! Studios.
Caricature & Portrait
Celebrities, clients, colleagues, grandparents, your weird uncle. Caricatures as gifts, for events, for corporate swag, or just because. Available digital and print-ready.
Editorial & Book Illustration
Children's books, graphic novels, cover design, interior illustration, and storyboarding. Published work with multiple authors, Kickstarter campaigns, and traditional publishers.
Graphic Recording
Real-time visual note-taking at your conferences, summits, workshops, meetings and corporate events.
Social Avatar / Flipface
The original human-made digital avatar. Hand drawn, delivered fast. Available in standard and hi-res (Flipface Max). Each comes with a Support Human Art badge for your profile.
1–2 DAY TURNAROUND
SELECTED WORK
What’s New
Take a look at some of my current work and projects. If you’d like to see more, click the links below. You can also visit some of my more Notable Projects.
LOOK FAMILIAR?
You May Have Seen My Work:
So, Let's Make Something.
Whether you need a custom illustration, a caricature for an event, a graphic recorder for a conference, or you just want to ask a question, this is the right place. Fill out the form and I'll get back to you fast. I actually respond.
Not sure what you need? That's fine too. Tell me what you're working on and we'll figure out the right thing together.
Typical response time: same day or next business day.
Looking for something specific?