Who watches the watchmen?

You know that eerie feeling, like you are being watched? I'm thinking the Albuquerque Police Department has been experiencing that recently. I did this illustration to accompany a story (in the Weekly Alibi, click here to view) about how the City Council in Albuquerque voted to have the U.S. Department of Justice investigate the APD. The Feds said... They were already looking into it! OooooOOOOoo!

So I decided to set the illustration in a diner, because I love drawing food. I've got Lady Justice with a chocolate milkshake and some unlucky cop about to take a bite of his lemon meringue pie, when he realizes... That he is being watched!

Researching diners was a lot of fun. So many great visuals. I can see why George Lucas wanted to put a diner scene into Phantom Menace. Right. I can only imagine what the computer jockeys were thinking when Jorge asked them to concoct a diner scene for STAR WARS. For no good reason. At all. For more thoughts on matters of this nature, I recommend RedLetterMedia's hilarious autopsy of that whole fiasco.



Here is my initial sketch. I was struggling to put the "DINER" lettering in the window, but eventually gave up and decided to just try really hard to make the setting look like a diner without literally spelling it out.


And here's the refined sketch. One day I hope to get to a point where I can skip this step and go straight to final. In the mean time, I will hug my giant Wacom tablet to my chest and drink more tea.