Honolulu Magazine: Bed & Breakfast Battle

Aloha! Honolulu Magazine was established in 1888 (its original title was "Paradise of the Pacific) by King Kalakaua. Talk about a long and venerable history! I was so pleased to get to work for this publication.

The article I illustrated was "Bed & Breakfast Battle". It deals with the controversy that is being created due to the influx of BnB's into Honolulu's neighbourhoods.


I showed different perspectives of the issue in the sketches I submitted. In this sketch, I wanted to show the tourists as obnoxiously kissy-kissy and to contrast the their flowery surroundings and luxurious food with the more down-to-earth life of the neighbour.


In this sketch I wanted to show a bit more conflict -- turn it up a notch!


I went a more comedic route with this one and flipped the perspective around. The tourist is depicted as a destructive force that the BnB is welcoming to shore.


Here's the one we went with! It's still got that conflict element but not as overt. Honolulu is a pretty classy magazine so I can see why the art director picked this one. She cited my "Dorothy in the Poppy Field" as a favourite piece, so I tried to make the illustration for this commission have a similar look. The background has the same faraway feel.


This is the cleaned up sketch. I am always playing with the scale and position of the elements in my compositions. I made the tourist-guy a lot bigger, for instance -- along with dozens of other minute adjustments.

I inked it with a tech pen because that's what I used for the Dorothy piece. Sometimes I use a brush, it varies from piece to piece. Some examples:

"Be Somebody or Be Somebody's Fool: National Post" -- Brush
"Who Watches the Watchmen?: The Weekly Alibi" -- Tech Pen
"Macleans back page Obit piece: August" -- Brush
"Happy Canada Day: Personal piece" -- Brush

Funnily enough, I use a nib (dip pen) for all of my watercolour cat cards but I've never used it in my illustrations. I find that I'm pretty shaky with my line quality using nibs and it just makes my stuff look weird. Maybe one day!