New York Times Weekend Arts

This past Friday I had the very great pleasure of working with Richard Aloisio at the New York Times to make the cover of the Weekend Arts section. Here is an awesome photo taken with my telephoto professional camera, the iPhone.

The assignment was for a summer book review. Richard gave me a general direction (summer, the joy of reading, beach reads) and let me totter off. I started with many many very rough sketches. I drew a lot of cliche ideas. As the night wore on, I drew some bizarre ideas. Here are some sketches that I hope fell somewhere in the middle.

The idea I liked best was to use bright, summer colors in semi-translucent paper droplets to represent the different summer books, and a person in a field of these book-droplets who gets to pick their favorite one. Luckily that was the one that was picked! I was thinking about a collage from an earlier project. Here are two more finished sketches that came next:

 Richard suggested I add a sun and a beach to add a bit of context and make the scene more summery. He also had the idea to use pages from the actual books that were being reviewed. Here is a bit of process work. I think I saved it at this point because this was when I thought, these damn paper droplet thingy-s are tiny and this is taking forever arrrrrrg oh god I better save this file. Now you know my secret art-making process!