Illustration Throwback Thursday #4

In 1994 I got a job through a design firm to do a cover illustration for the “Rolaids Relief Man Award Media Guide“, a 4 “x 9” booklet with the current year’s Major League Baseball relief pitchers statistics, put out by Rolaids in conjunction with their sponsorship of the MLB “Relief Man Award”. The cover usually featured caricatures of prominent relief pitchers and/or past award winners. The design firm angle was typical of smaller specialty publications, especially for sports teams or sponsors. They often hired a design firm to do the design and layout of the publication, and then the client would provide the content and a printing house would publish the results.

In this particular case I ended up doing two covers. Originally they had me do the above illustration of three pitchers “knocking on the door” of the “300 Saves Clubhouse”. They liked the final results but we ran into trouble when it was discovered that MLB had to give the approval for any image that included more than two professional players together at once, which was a new legal requirement. Rolaids did not want to go through that process, so we did this second cover with only two pitchers:

I believe that is Lee Smith and Goose Gossage. They liked this one also, and we agreed on a kill fee for the first one that was only a little less than my full fee. Both of these were done using the traditional comic book line and color method (pre-computers) of a film pos overlay and blue line board which is then hand water-colored.

Unfortunately the people that printed the guide didn’t know what to do with the overlay/board combo and just drum scanned them both together at once. That resulted in misaligned lines and horrible color. Even though it as not my fault, the design firm blamed me and I never did another job for Rolaids. They stopped giving out the award in 2012.