Illustration Throwback Thursday!

I’m stealing a page from Facebook and will occasional do a “Throwback Thursday” feature here on the blog… but not adorable pictures of me as a toddler. Rather, I’ll try and post some really early work of mine.¬¨‚Ć This is my very first published magazine illustration.

Yikes. Everything’s lumpy…

This was circa 1991. I had been doing comic book pencils for NOW Comics for a year or two, and had freshly moved back to Minnesota from Atlanta when I received a phone call from Kyle Peterson, a friend of mine from art college. He had become an associate art director at MSP Communications, a local Twin Cities publisher that produced a few local magazines, including Mpls/St. Paul Magazine. They were looking for an illustrator to do a piece about a local politician who had gotten in a bit of trouble over some womanizing (SHOCKING!). I honestly can’t remember the politician’s name. This involved a caricature, and Kyle remembered me having done caricatures at the theme park during breaks from school.

I was assigned the job and had my very first magazine illustration job. I also had no idea how to do it. Up to this point I had really only done pencil work for comics, some ink line drawings and a lot of airbrushed caricatures at amusement parks. I did a half airbrush, half watercolor paint job on it. The client was reasonably satisfied but looking back it’s a horrible piece. Bad placement, some bad drawing, rough painting, so so composition… hard to believe I ended up making a living from this. Of course, this was 23 years ago.