Posting

This is crazy. Time goes past so quickly!  I have the newsletters and the fharper site that shows my gallery oriented art. Add in a bunch of travel and deadlines and a small amount of social life and boom! a whole month has gotten past me. My newsletter that you can sign up for on this very site shared pictures and links related to my experience in Turkey. The other site shows figure drawings and side adventures not always about art. But here I focus more on the latest published illustrations and illustration oriented stuff I do.

And now the past week's story of my latest cover for The Week Magazine.

Monday around 2pm I'm in The Week Magazine office to get the next cover assignment. They start out with a question. "How many faces can you draw in one picture?" In my mind I here claps of thunder and ominous music as dark scary clouds form on the ceiling. I respond with "I guess we'll find out?" This first step I drew in the office. Just to make sure I don't miss something, I like to get a clear sketch of all the elements they want in the illustration before I leave. Then they can ask for variations or I can suggest things in person. It's one of the funner parts of the process for me. Human interaction, go figure!

Step 2: Tighter drawing. From the office I stop at the grocery store to grab some food for the next few days since I'm not going to be going anywhere for a bit. Then I draw the image on the board I'll be painting on. I think about how I'm going to paint this monster on the way home. I determine the back ground is going to be digital. It's simple and lends itself to the stronger points of my digital painting abilities.

Still Monday (in my mind) it's actually about 3 am and I do a nice little color indication and value study for the art director and editors to see so they aren't surprised by my color selections.

Tuesday morning. About 11 am I get feedback. Make Trump's head bigger (HA) Get better ref of Fiorina, make Rubio's head a little smaller and make the spotlight clearer. Oh, and add a microphone and red curtain back drop. This was some extensive tweaking! I had to redraw 3 faces completely and then figure out how to put the microphone in there without it getting lost. Doing caricatures, I decided to make it larger. I also liked how I could use it to show off the chaos in the figures by making it the stable shape with the stand being straight up and down or more static. By contrast the figures looked more crazy without me having to do too much in the way of figure acrobatics.

And the final. I was over confident part way through. I had only painted in three faces and I decided to take a break to see the last period of the NY Rangers hockey game at the bar across the street. I don't have a television so I have to outsource. I timed it wrong and got there too early. Had to sit through the intermission from the first period to the second. I came back as soon as it was clear they were going to win. Much later than I planned. With fresher eyes I could see I underestimated how much longer it was going to take. Twelve hours and 6 espressos later I turned in the final around 10 am, Wednesday. On time! At 10:01 I was snoring in bed.