this year i have been honored to have the chance to illustrate a majority of the covers for Angie’s list magazine.

the new october issue which addresses with what to do when an elderly parent has passed away or moved and you have to deal with the life time of stuff that they have accumulated.

here are the roughs the art director Tanja Pohl and i deliberated over.

and with the last minute aide of a great working headline ”

They’re dead
You’re buried

How to get out from under the clutter

this is the sketch that came up

a sequence of about 100 shots during the process of setting up the clutter, setting up the lighting, adjusting the lighting and getting the image ‘just right’

the final…

now that i felt i had a visual solution for the main character and how he was going to live in this red nose world, i decided to jump into the visual storytelling and trying to find the right spot for the right image to help visually tell the story without just illustrating the authors words and trying to figure out the best way for the visuals to carry through all the various locations the garbage gets pulled to and all the people of those areas and how upset they are to see someone else’s garbage come into their ports.

even during the first couple reads of the manuscript i sketched thumbnails where it felt like visuals needed to be.

compared to the usual ‘one image that needs to say everything’ i found that organizing the sequence of visuals was a tough challenge. and turned to the handy post-it notes to be able to keep the thumbnails loose and ‘movable’

sometimes drawing several versions of one scene, trying to find the right composition that stood alone and still worked with the rest of the images as a whole.

here is a shot of the first draft of all the pages together. soome will make it through to the end and some will be drawn and revised several time to try to get it ‘right’

here are a couple of the spreads with the text laid on by the designer and we start to see the book in full scope.

next i head to a landfill to research the hidden beauty of trash and what its like to take care of all the crap we mostly aimlessly throw away every week…

not only was the tugboat going to play a BIG part in the picture book but more importantly was the character of the crusty old captain Duffy St. Pierre.

here is one of the few shots of his face i could find. not much to go on, which probably was a good thing and allowed me to take some artistic license with his character.

it was quite a challenge to figure out how he was going to function on this tugboat. how was he going to be a prominent character on this 90′ tugboat?

too superficial, too young..

a pretty watercolor study, but he still aint right…

now we are getting some ‘character’ in him

this says crusty old sailor to me

this sketch is what did it for me. once this came out, i knew how he would work with the tugboat. much like the Spanish soldiers on horseback in 1519 when the Aztecs only saw the soldier on the horse they were thought of as a type of mythical figure… well my thought was that you wouldnt see Duffy on his own, he would always be in the pilot house, one with the vessel.

this is the color sketch that really got the ball rolling…