Breaking out

It's always cool to do an illustration that'll appear someplace my friends and family might just stumble across naturally. I was excited, then, to be asked to draw the cover to this week's Pittsburgh City Paper.

Weekly publications like this always have ultra-tight deadlines, so there's not a lot of time to experiment with different ideas and sketches. Fortunately, the art director gave me a pretty good idea of what she wanted that I could use as a starting point, and this is how I saw it in my head:

Once I got approval on the sketch, I finished it up. Since this paper is given out free all over the city, it's important that the cover be really bright and eye-catching to encourage people to pick it up. I've been really interested in working with more intense color schemes lately so it was fun to come up with a palette that was surprising and appealing and would really get people's attention.

Here's the finished version that will appear on stands all over Pittsburgh starting today: