PJ Loughran is a busy guy.

In addition to his career as an illustrator, creating his wonderful line and color illustrations for clients like The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, Sports Illustrated, Nike, Ford, Simon and Schuster and Harper Collins, he has served as the Design Director and Creative Director at the AGENCY.COM, and has recently founded his own firm, Kerosense Creative Services.

If that weren’t enough, Loughran is a musician and songwriter, with two full length records to his credit and performances that have included opening for the likes of R.E.M, Taj Mahal, Todd Rundgren, REO SPeedwagon and the North Mississippi All-Stars.

Oh yes, Loughran is also an adjunct professor at Parsons, teaching classes in web design, illustration and drawing, and has been a guest lecturer at a number of other art schools and universities.

And I thought I had a busy schedule.

While wearing his illustrator’s hat, Loughran has garnered recognition from The Art Directors Club of New York, Communication Arts Magazine, Print Magazine and the Society of Illustrators (more details here).

His illustrations have a wonderfully loose, almost casual feeling, with lots of varied-weight to his ink lines, bright, freely-applied areas of color, interesting suggestions of texture and the frequent use of open, irregularly shaped compositions, in which the image is not constrained by a rectangle. He sometimes incorporates collage-like elements of photographs, colored and integrated with the drawings.

His portfolio opens to an initial page from which you choose a category of subject matter. Once in a sub-section, you can click on one of the large images for an enlarged view, which opens in a pop-up that allows you to conveniently click forward and aback through all of the images if you like. (Are you paying attention, all you designers of artists’ web sites who think that “pop-up and close, pop-up and close” is a good arrangement for an artist’s portfolio?)

There is an article about Loughran from a few years ago on the Adobe site that features a brief how-to for one of his sports themed images.