Editorial Illustrations

I did a few editorial illustrations over the last month or so culminating in a Pittsburgh Steelers cover for the Pittsburgh City Paper. The story was about internal issues facing the team this season. In my sketches attempted to show the Steelers dealing with themselves, a la Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or a devil and an angel on on their shoulder pads, whispering in their ear hole, or with a looming shadow of Darth Vader (remember when Star Wars Episode 1 was just a cool teaser poster):

After some back and forth, we eventually settled on the second sketch, two identical players lined up, ready to hit each other. I like to imagine this is an Oklahoma style drill except they’d probably be wearing practice jerseys but I digress. For some of the initial sketches, I added color because I thought it was necessary to illustrate the idea. Since this sketch was just a rough pencil drawing, when the art director chose it, I did a revised, color version for final approval:

I drew this with ball point pens, so having a color sketch helped me to minimize mistakes (useful with a medium as unforgiving as ink). Here is the final illustration, sans title logo and lettering:

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