A few Older Cover Illustrations

One of the pleasures of working for an alt weekly, is the ability to tackle broad illustrations for covers and feature stories. Working with the writers and editors, giving my personal view of the stories they write, feeds that need to collaborate.

Here are a few of such illustrations. Above is one of the first illustrations I created for the City Paper. Its also the first professional all-digital photo collages I created. Although an in-house job, I was able to take my time, teaching myself the rights and wrongs of digital manipulation. Although I am able to see the problems with this illustration now, I still think it was a successful illustration. I also won a 1st place SPJ award for it.



The first "boy in a box" cover demonstrates a mixture of photo collage and old fashioned hand drawn characters( a style I use in most illustrations anymore). The second "The Prodigy" Is probably one of my top 3 favorite illustrations. I also won a Keystone award for it. 2nd place this time...


One of the jobs Im called on for most is medium to heavy photo manipulation, or "Frankenstein-ing" as I like to call it. The cover above "never mind the sequins" was a bit of a challenge. The task was to take an indoor, dark, populated shot of people dressed like fish, and put them underwater. As always I immediately said "we can do it", much to the confusion (still after all this time) of my coworkers. Then came the task of figuring out how to do it. After some hours, it was done. I love the way it came out, and through the screw-ups (many) I managed to learn a great deal from it.