In previous posts I have written about my two ongoing assignments for the Times, here are last week’s installments:
On the Road was about business jet travel slowly returning after a lull caused by the public outcry against corporate perks.
The Science story was about how pregnant crickets prenatally warn their offspring about predators.
This illustration for the Sunday Jobs page was about a woman who left her job to follow her boyfriend to a new city. You can read more about this assignment and see all the sketches in the blog.
This spot was for an article on the future of the bond bubble.
Here are a few spots from the past month, two for The Wall Street Journal, one for The Washington Post. This first one was for the WSJ Europe Edition, about space junk. I thought I was finished when I got here…
…but it felt pretty blah. So I added some space whoosh, then a little spot color and…done.
This one was about the outlook for the bond bubble. I sent both of these and the full color version ran.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I have a regular assignment for The Washington Post’s Sunday Jobs cover. The illustration is paired with a job market Q&A feature called How to Deal. This Q was from a young woman seeking advice on how to tell prospective employers that she left her last job to follow her boyfriend to a new city for grad school. I definitely had fun with this one – nothing too cerebral, just mixing and matching romance cliches with office imagery. I sent these five sketches feeling pretty darn good about all of them:
And here is the final:
This isn’t my usual thing, but it just seemed so right for the story, and the art director and editor were all in agreement. This style of comic imagery is perfect for satire – there is so much melodrama built into them already and everyone gets that, it’s automatic, instant.
This is the most recent illustration I did for The New York Times Book Review, from last month:
For illustration, the Book Review is an institution. Every Sunday when I was a student, I would get the paper and check there first to see who was working – Niemann, Mirko, Richard McGuire, Boris Kulikov, Robert Grossman’s color spots on the back page; it was a ritual. In addition to (and on occasion, instead of) whatever academic tasks I had on my desk, I would take selections each week from the Book Review to illustrate, my own extracurricular job training. It seemed so mysterious to me then, as if it had its own esoteric style, not illustration style per se, but a methodology, and one that seemed more abstract in terms of the relationship between word and image. Whether that assessment was an accurate one or not, it is how I have approached the assignments, and why I’ve enjoyed working for them so much over the past ten years.
In previous posts I have written about my two ongoing assignments for the Times, here are last week’s installments:
The Road column last week was on the end of gluttonous trade show after-parties.
The Science story was about how fishing boats can change the foraging patterns of seabirds.
This illustration was for the NYTimes Arts & Leisure section for a comparison of the programming on Spike and Lifetime. It was a nice big top cover; prime newspaper-art real estate. The article was hilarious and I was feeling no pressure (ha!) to be as funny. This is actually an amalgamation of two ideas (the man with the bra brain was originally paired with a woman whose brain sported big glasses) and I was never 100% about how they would hang together as a set. The editors were instantly sold on bra brain but felt that the woman’s mind should be devoted to varied concerns. That made sense for sure but how to show that in an equally singular, but opposite way? For me, and in our limited timeframe, it couldn’t be done (not for a lack of trying), and we ended up using the woman from an alternate set.
So, after all was said and done, my happy couple that were supposed to span the width of the cover, ran at about 5” wide total. A little disappointing, but that’s how it goes with newspapers sometimes, things change so fast.
…have been pretty hectic, with school starting up and the getting used to being out of the office for the better part of three weekdays. I’ve been doing my illustration assignments at even more ungodly hours than usual and feeling like I’m on the losing team in a long game of catch-up. Here are a few small jobs from the past couple of very long weeks:
A little over a year ago I did a job where the editors knew exactly what they wanted – a man looking through a telescope with the constellations making different tech gadgets – cell phones, laptops, and so on. Since then, I have changed those constellations countless times, just for laughs, but finally, I really liked one and for my own amusement, I redid the entire image.
Last week’s On the Road column in the NYTimes was about face to face business meetings versus emails, texts, Skype, etc. The column featured an interview with a lawyer who prefers always to meet in person, despite the expense.
