New Macleans illustration on newsstands next week

My latest illustration for Macleans. Look for this one to come out next week, subscribers will already have it. Nothing beats having an illustration published and mailed to my door three days after I've emailed it to the art director!

I got this job the same day another job was due (one I'm really excited to share, that'll be an epic December post!). I was exhausted but I don't turn down work. Well, in about five years I've turned down two jobs and that's it. In fact, this other job came in during the same aforementioned epic project -- I can't say no!

The subject of the illustration had one of those iconic green turtle sandboxes, where he first showed his love of construction sites and building things. I knew I wanted to use the sandbox as the framing device. It's fun to do a non-rectangular frame to mix it up from time to time. I've noticed that I use water in a lot of my frames, so this time I wanted to include it in a different way. The subject lived on a lake and enjoyed fishing in the summers and hockey in the winters. Sometimes I depict things too literally, it's tough for me to make stuff even a little abstract. I think I managed to do it a little in this one. Baby steps!

Back to the tiredness. You know those times when you're so exhausted you have to shake yourself awake every five seconds, like you're a teen in a Freddy Krueger movie? That was me on this job. I'd been pulling sixteen hour days for eleven days straight and I was coming off of an all-nighter leading up to this. My definition of all-nighter = awake for twenty-four hours straight. I realize that some people define it merely as staying up all night and going to bed the next morning or afternoon. That's sad. Anyway, by the end of this job I'd been up for about thirty-four hours. I felt a little rough. I think you can tell by the following sketch (which was for my purposes only, I don't submit sketches in this state to art directors!):

And here's the sketch after I attacked it with my Wacom tablet:

Inking something with a brush becomes really challenging if you are nodding off every five seconds. The brush started diving into the paper of its own accord. Tryin' to screw with me! But I totally won. I beat that double-zero sable brush by technical knock-out. It was close, though...