in the works

For something a little different, I'm going to show the process work behind the final illustration for my current project: the World Record assignment. I chose to illustrate the World's Largest Ball of Yarn--not to be confused with the World's Largest Ball of Twine, which is either in Darwin, MN or Branson, MO depending on your source. I'm rooting for the one in Branson because it was supposedly built by a millionaire in Texas using a "system of pulleys," and I like that "a system of pulleys" is in quotes on Wiki (here) like, hey, that's all you really need to know.

I don't know where the Largest Ball of Yarn is. The internet has failed me for the first time.

Anyway, here are some of the thumbnails. For each project I come up with anywhere from 12 to 20 2" x 3" thumbnails. Here are a couple of them (click to zoom in):


The idea is to emphasize how very large the ball of yarn is. The ball of yarn in space and the circus-freak yarn-ball-head characters crack me up, but there was something about the expression of the girl drowning in scarf that I couldn't pass up.


Because I'm working digitally, I'm sort of skipping some steps. Normally I would do a larger black and white value sketch, followed by a color comp, but for this one I'm steam-rolling ahead and just blowing up the thumbnail in place of the b&w sketch.