The Week last time out.

The Dare2Draw folks invited me to give a "pro tip" for their segment "Draw like a pro". I had 3 to 5 minutes to explain something. I chose hands because a lot of young people in art I come across openly say drawing hands is the hardest and they don't like doing it. Well drawing hands is very important to any figurative art. I knew I wasn't going to show anyone how to draw a hand in less than five minutes so my main message was practice. Draw that thing you find is hard. I said it but who knows if I taught it!

I didn't really intend to say so much about Dare2Draw, but I feel I need to be clear even in my side comments sometimes. What I really wanted to show here is the last cover I did for The Week Magazine featuring the Pope. Yeah THE Pope and his recent visit to New York city. I included this in with my presentation to D2D. There are a lot of hands in this one. Sometimes I have to make an illustration in a way I wouldn't do naturally. This is an example of one of those times. I had to change things so the title would be legible. I worked with Dan, the AD, to make sure the words would read and had to ruin the illusion of depth above the door and Pope by lightening everything. But I painted everything in anyway so I could work some things out in the paint.

Above is the way it printed.

This is mostly a raw scan. I darkened the area above the Pope clumsily in Photo Shop to give the idea I would have preferred to do. But it's sort of important to be able to read the headline, eh?