Illustration Throwback Thursday: Teen Sci Fi!

This was a job I did for the School Library Journal back in 2008, illustrating a story about popular teen science fiction literature from years ago compared to modern work. I happened to run across the concept roughs and much of the process stuff as well so I thought it might be interesting to see that:

Above: Two initial thumbnail concepts… one a full page and one a “cross gutter” type layout. Often a magazine job needs to be placed within an already set layout, but in this case they allowed me flexibility in that regard.

They liked the cross gutter layout, but wanted to swap some of the
characters around and leave room for a spread style headline…

Final pencil. The girl on the right looks awkwardly separated but the page gutter runs between her and “Eve”, so that dead space is necessary.

The finished art is at the top of the post. Inked with digital color.