Guide Magazine and Gag #3

Last summer at the Heroes Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina I met an incredibly talented illustrator named Brandon Reese.  A few weeks after the show, he dropped me a line to see if I'd like to do some illustration work for Guide Magazine, where he works as an art director.  I said "Yes!" and we got to work.  It was a real pleasure working with an art director who was also a working illustrator.  He made my job easy and didn't noodle with things or ask for a ton of changes.

Anyway, when I came home from Florida the other week, there were two copies of the magazine in my mail with my illustration on page one!  I drew this wintery image during the summer, when it was hot, so it seems VERY appropriate that it arrived in January (the low in Vermont today was 19 below zero!).  Below you can see the finished illustration and a small scan of the magazine spread, so you can see how it was used.

I really enjoyed working on this drawing.  It's not often that I get to just read a story and come up with an illustration to enhance it.  I would love to do more of this kind of work in the future.  Also, since I knew it would be printed in full color, it gave me a chance to try a new rendering method for snow, which was to overlay a sheet of dots (drawn with a sharpie and a lightbox) and just color them white with Photoshop.    It was MUCH faster than The Basewood Method, but I still think I probably spent about an hour moving around individual snowflakes, to avoid weird tangents.  That stuff is important!

Lastly, here is another gag that was originally published in Nickelodeon Magazine way back in 2006.  This was my third one, and as you can see here, it shows how much I love a good pun!