Illustration Throwback Thursday #47

In all the years I’ve done freelance illustration, this piece is the only one I ever asked to be credited under a pseudonym.

I did a fair amount of work for Penthouse magazine, back when there was a Penthouse Magazine, but never did anything “blue”. The art director called me up one day in about 2008 or so and wanted me to do the art for a humorous feature article, and possibly more art for future features. I immediately told him that if the art they wanted needed to include overt pornographic images I was not interested. He assured me they had a lot of features that would include no such images, and if I was uncomfortable doing anything asked of me I could refuse the job and he would totally understand. True to his word they never asked me to do anything pornographic , and I ended up doing illustrations for maybe a dozen features plus the art for a celebrity column by Dave Navarro.

This 2009 piece was for a feature about the cliché effects of smoking pot, and in particular how it puts even the toughest guys in touch with their feminine side. It was a pretty funny article, actually. I asked to use the pseudonym because I thought the article glorified the use of (then) illegal drugs, and while I didn’t consider pot use to be particularly heinous it was illegal and I did work for clients like Scholastic and Sport Illustrated Kids. I didn’t feel comfortable with my name on this feature while it also appeared in a bunch of kid’s magazines.

In retrospect that was pretty stupid. My name was in Penthouse regularly, and even if most of the illustrations were caricatures of Dave Navarro it was still Penthouse. If Scholastic or any other kid’s publication was going to have a problem with that, it wouldn’t matter if I was drawing bunny rabbits or people shooting heroin in Penthouse. I’m no prude, but there are certain lines I won’t cross just because once you do it’s easy to get pigeonholed into being an artist who does “that kind of work”, and then finding that’s the majority of the jobs you get.

I did do one illustration that was borderline “blue” for Penthouse, but I pulled what I called a “Barbie” on it to make it more acceptable for me to do. I’ll see if I can dig that up and share it next Thursday.