mlk day

For this week's Blotter illustration I did something unusual and dipped into the realm of caricature. The crime report dealt with all the shady stuff that went down in the city on MLK Day, so I thought it would poignant to show MLK himself frowning down from heaven.

Although I'm happy with how the drawing turned out, I'm also sorta kicking myself because I think I invested too much time in it. That's the constant challenge with freelancing (and sometimes with personal works as well): knowing when to say when.
After a year of freelancing full-time I've gotten a lot better about being able to judge the scope of a project, and I'm also faster now at turning out work that I'm proud of. But sometimes a drawing will still take forever to complete, and it seems to be completely unpredictable when that will happen.

stripper rip-off

The new Blotter drawing. The item involved a 33-year-old man who'd accumulated a $475 tab at a strip club then tried to run out without paying. Nice.

I've been playing around with watercolors lately, thus the gradual shift in background texture.

raaw!

More crazy folks from the weekly crime report. I had fun with this one.

web 2.0

While brainstorming for the illustration to go with this month's tech column in AirTran's Go magazine, I kept thinking about an artist who had a profound effect on me as a young reader: Sergio Aragones. I used to really love the doodles he did in the margins of Mad magazine — but even better were his sprawling, two-page spreads that usually involved hundreds of little characters and bizarre situations.
I think some of that spirit came through here to illustrate the story about the participatory nature of Web 2.0.