Jeff Durham

Lazy Sunday Drawing Session

2025-02-24T10:53:00.000-08:00

Suffered through a too-lazy-to-do-anything weekend. So I played with the cats, did small amounts of house-keeping and sat at the desk for a couple of hours staring at Pinterest and drawing some of what I saw there.

I also had some Old-Time Radio shows playing to distract me from those worries that bubble up when I sit quietly and draw; and mostly to keep my brain away from current events. We are in a very dark time.

OTR has been a favorite distraction and entertainment for me since the late 70s. Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. Gunsmoke. "Matt Dillon, United States Marshal. The first man they look for, and the last they wanna meet. It's a chancy job, and it makes a man watchful. And a little lonely..." That's the stuff!

A nice, quiet couple of hours. And now, back to work...

Head Shots

2025-02-06T10:30:00.000-08:00

Head doodles. How is it done? Just play along with me...

First! Draw a circle or an oval or a square, then make an eye or a mouth or a triangle for the nose, then let the features flow from the tip of the pencil and see what you get. Maybe look at a picture to get an idea for hair, or find a nose that doesn't look like the noses you usually draw. The characters stack up and rarely do two look the same.

You can reference the work of other cartoonists, too; maybe there are head shapes you haven't happened to have doodled yet. Copy a head shape, but put the eyes a bit higher, make the nose bigger, turn that smile into a frown.

My heads here are fairly restrained, they do not venture into the realm of the more distorted cartoony caricatures, but I have recently not been so daring.

I might try to expand my idle-doodle-time to include full figures. That takes a bit more concentration but it's a lot of fun, too.

24 cartoony head doodles.

I suppose could make videos of these drawings with the screen capture feature in ClipStudio. I've done that before but I wasn't amused by the effort of wrangling iMovie to make it presentable. It wasn't hard after all few tries but I burnt out on it while learning how to do it. I should go back and take another shot at it.

There. A project for my next bout of insomnia!

The end.

Sketching on the iPad

2025-01-16T09:23:00.000-08:00

Here are a few drawings I recently created on the iPad in ClipStudio. I've been thinking about not signing up for the full version at the end of the next subscription period. I haven't been using the fancier features for anything.

This is me throwing shade at me for not doing much art lately. We'll see if it works.

Cartoony drawings of three ladies and Supergirl!

The End

Sketchbook Post, January 13

2025-01-13T10:55:00.000-08:00

Here are some drawings from the ol' sketchbook. I've never been good at keeping a steady sketchbook – but every once in a while I manage to focus my energies on the task and get a few pages properly vandalized.

These scribbles are some of what I've made at the breakfast table over the past couple of weeks. They are loose, informal studies from the web and a book or two. For the pencil drawings I tried to re-ignite my long-unused half-assed semi-ambidextrousness, but it was very difficult. Theses drawing are combo lefty-righty to accommodate my short flurries of raging frustration. I was never comfortable with delicate left-handed drawing -- big charcoal figure studies done with arm and wrist were pretty easy -- but noodling with the fingers is always tough. Moreso now!

ANyway. There's nothing special here. I'm just trying to keep the blog and the love of drawing alive.

Sorry I Missed Your Call

2025-01-06T20:42:00.003-08:00

Four years ago I was fiddling with a little op-ed cartoon idea inspired by something I had read over the weekend. It was right after the Trump/Raffensperger phone call came to light. My memory of details is hazy but — as is shown in the text of the animation — the story reported that the Trump team had tried calling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger 18 times in the effort to pressure him to rig the election in Trump’s favor. But good ol’ Raffy sensed there was fuckery afoot and he wasn’t answering the call. At least he made them wait, eh?

It was scandalous, of course, but also kind of cute and funny in the seemingly unserious cacophony of unhinged nonsense flowing from MAGA back then. I was tickled by the image it conjured and so was inspired to make this cartoon. "La la la. Do you hear a ringing? Is that the phone? Jeepers, it stopped ringing just as I was about to pick up. Too busy to answer. La la la."

Cartoon animation of Brad Raffensperger
not answering the phone.

I had been experimenting with simple animation, so i put together the wiggly drawing above, just for larks. I had the flimsy notion of showing it to an editor at work— we weren’t doing any editorial cartoons or animations but there had been discussions about developing a project along those lines. Maybe I’d show it as a proof-of -concept, or simply as a reminder that I had been paying attention to what we had talked about.

I finalized the gif before work and wasn’t happy with it. I was not inclined to show it but hadn’t completely decided against it. Then I logged in for work — January 6, 2021, y’know? — and saw the newsfeed; MAGA was attacking the Capitol. Total shitshow.

Suddenly a small joke about Raffensperger avoiding answering the phone wasn’t cute or charming. Or relevant. So I put my cartoon in the rear-view mirror and moved on. I saw the gif yesterday morning while rummaging through an old external drive and, considering the timing, I thought I’d set it free.

Hang in there fellow Americans. Another shitshow incoming.

Back-to-Back Illustrations

2024-11-15T14:03:00.000-08:00

I recently had a run of three illustrations published within one week. That used to be fairly standard for my job back in the 2000s and early 2010s, but such a flurry of artistic work is a rarity now. I was happy to do it, but also relieved to find that the effort didn’t stress me overmuch. It is good to know that I can still comfortably ratchet up to the pace of the olden days; I felt good about that. I’m showing two of the drawings here since they go together!

Two illustrations for the 2024 Mercury News coverage of the annual Silicon Valley Poll

The newspaper, in partnership with a regional studies organization, conducts an annual public opinion survey in the Bay Area and — looking at it selfishly — it is usually good fodder for illustration opportunities. The poll typically generates three or four days of stories based on the analysis of the survey data. This year I committed to two illustrations running on back to back days.

I prefer to work on one assignment at a time but I had to cultivate both illustrations in tandem because I mistakenly thought my Day 2 effort was for Day 1 – my bad. So I had to adjust course to make sure that I had the right one done first. I managed to get them both finished before the weekend so the only speed bump of consequence encountered was a mental one. Whew.

This is how the illustrations appeared in print.

The rough sketches

The illustration for ‘Day 1’ pertained to economic hardship, the expense of living here and the housing crisis. As is often the case for illustration assignments, the story and the illustration are developed at the same time, and one must hope that during the reporting and writing the story doesn’t reveal itself to have a different focal point than the one we anticipated. That did not happen in this case — there was the benefit seeing the poll data as a guide for the main interests of the story — but I tried to represent homelessness and the cost of housing in a general sense to hopefully cover any possible variation on the theme.

I swiped a house pic from the internet to avoid spending the time

drawing one to sell the idea if it was just going to be rejected.

The robot illustration didn’t stray much from the accepted rough. I selfied for reference!

The illo for ‘Day 2’ is meant to speak to our fear of the rise technocracy, its diabolical impact on our society and the soul-crushing potential of Artificial Intelligence to disrupt the lives of the common man, the common worker… the common newspaper illustrator. Yeah, I’m feeling it.

‘Day 2,’ as the 'Day 1' illustration, is also conceptually basic; it’s the simple “fear of the future as a robot” cliche that we should all try to stay away from, although it’s about the 100th time I’ve used it. But it’s the idea that got through the approval gauntlet and, contrarily, I absolutely enjoy the cliche! After all, my childhood dream was to be one of those guys who sketched the robot illustrations for the Fred Saberhagen stories in Galaxy Magazine. As I walk and talk and opine in the world of adults, I raise my nose and dismiss the banal predictability of such a hackneyed concept. But at my core I am ecstatic. "Destroy all humans," I whisper.

That's all for this time! Everything was drawn in ClipStudio for iPad.

the end

A Surprising Illustration

2024-11-06T22:09:00.000-08:00

I work for the Mercury News/East Bay Times family of newspapers, and late one morning back in April, I was asked to make a quick illustration for a story about the Oakland Athletics and the team’s potential move to Las Vegas. And as I recall, the story also touched upon the likely inequity of the deals that could be given by cash-strapped Oakland and La$ Vega$ respectively.

This is the final art as drawn in ClipStudio on the iPad.

It had to be a quick turnaround because it was a same-day assignment. We had a brief discussion to come up with an idea and then I sketched the rough, creating my own cartoon interpretation of the A’s mascot, Stomper the elephant.

This is the initial rough. I like the washers, peanuts and comb on the table, symbolic of Oakland's offer being comparable to whatever it is they might have in their pockets! Probably discarded that idea because it might not be a clear message.

It was then vetted and approved. From the get-go the drawing was leaning too far toward being “cute” for my liking but there wasn’t much time to course-correct. And I may have given in to my cheesy inclinations and hammed it up. Obviously.

It was the Sports Page after all, right? It had been a while since I had done a light-hearted illustration for sports, but it wasn’t boldly inappropriate to put a some silliness onto that section front. So i went with it.

I shipped it to the page designer ahead of the deadline — felt pretty good about that — and finished up my shift. Whew.

As it appeared on the front page.
Yikes!

The next morning, before work, I went out for groceries. Imagine my surprise – imagine my loud wheezing gasp when I saw the paper on the news rack. And right there, on the front page — not inside on the sports section but on the A1 front page — was my cute drawing. Ugh!

A1 is prime real estate, the work is the main display on the rack and online for the world. It’s considered a big deal. I’ve done a lot of front-page illustrations over the decades but i’m pretty sure this was the first instance where I was not aware of that fact beforehand.

Although I approach all of my assignments with the same commitment, A1 elicits, for me, a stronger sense of wanting to better represent the work my art is calling attention to.

If I had known would I have done something differently? I shrug and say I don’t know. Maybe I wouldn’t have made his eyes so big, his cheeks so shiny; perhaps I would have muzzled the cute.

Looking at it now I feel like I may have gotten away with something cheeky without aiming to.

Lost Memories

2024-03-05T11:24:00.000-08:00

Last month, a villain broke a window on my car and swiped a pouch from the back seat. (The door was unlocked, wretched burglar!) The criminal was likely disappointed by the plunder; they made off with only pens, pencils and a sketchbook of priceless sentimental value.

Alas, the sketchbook held about ten years of doodles, all drawn by me and my kid; drawings at the park, at the beach, at the zoo, sitting in the coffee shop. Here are two drawings of my daughter during her ballet classes when she was six years old.

I’m over it now, mostly. But here are a few of the doodles lost. I took pictures of some pages over the years, but not very many. It had a black faux-leather cover, and if you held it just so in the light, you could see a black sharpie caricature of me, drawn by a four or five year old Evelyn. That was my favorite drawing in the book.

Not totally down in the dumps over it, but watch out! There are some real jerks roving around out in the real world.

The End

Where Did 2022 Go?

2023-08-30T22:47:00.002-07:00

Totally missed 2022, didn’t I? That’s alright, nobody’s really looking. I’m going to start this up again and pretend like it’s the next day. That sounds familiar (see previous post) but here I go.

2023 has been marked by series of misfortunes and medical concerns that have hobbled just about everything going on in my life. I have hopes that my choppy waters will smooth out and perhaps i can find a nice wave to ride comfortably through the rest of the year.

One of my personal trials has been a detached retina, and i am still recovering from the corrective surgery but I have returned to work and I am trying to carve out some time for personal art. Prior to the uncoupling of the retina I had been drawing cartoon heads on blank business cards and digitally coloring them just for funsies. I wanted to get back to that.

This batch are all one-eyed doodles. I could make a go of it as a cyclopian illustrator — there are minor challenges and discomforts to overcome — but my eye is healing nicely and I should be back to normal.

Now that Twitter is becoming a sewer, I’m compelled to start posting here regularly. One of my goals for this space was to have a written record of what I’ve been doing, and taking the time to put down some of my captured thoughts along side the work. I lost track of that, and I lost interest in doing it only for myself.

But with a young daughter who is now starting middle-school, this may not be a completely selfish vanity project. Perhaps she will want to see where I was at, and my twitter record may be too tedious and scattershot to wade through; I barely have the patience to look back more than a week my timeline. It’s a hassle! And, at any moment, our twitter archives may be lost to the whims of a wicked billionaire. Hopefully this will be a safer space.

Hello, Future Evelyn! I sure liked going to the park with you. The hot days, the windy days, barefoot-wading through the creek or watching the squirrels — it was bliss.

More later! In the next post…

Eighteen Months Later...

2021-10-27T22:12:00.001-07:00

Hey, my blog is still up. Might as well see if it still works. I'll just pretend like it's the next day.

I took a week off of work and it was good to have a break. I hoped to find the time (and the drive) to ignite some of the personal projects I've been daydreaming about, but I conjured nothing of substance. Chores and practical diversions chewed up most of my anticipated free time. I did manage to doodle this little collection of characters, though!

Drawn in Clip Studio Paint. Open in a new tab for a larger image.

Most of these figures are out-of-my-head freestyle creations. A few were adapted from photos I saw online, although they no longer resemble the source material. A couple were inspired by people I sketched during a visit to a street fair this summer.

Drawn in Clip Studio Paint. Open in a new tab for a larger image.

During the process I ginned up the swatches and loosely adhered to the color schemes. I thought it would be fun to limit myself to three or four colors per character and see what I could come up with. However, if I felt I needed another color I’d add another swatch or two. And in some cases I switched out colors that weren't working for me. In the end I used any color I wanted and the swatches were nothing more than a reminder that I shouldn't use too many colors.

I aimed to keep the drawings simple. I began each one using the lasso tool, blocking in big shapes, adding and subtracting as I went along and then waded in with a pen or brush tool to add details. I like the simpler ones better, generally speaking. I overworked a few of them and spent more time than I intended but I was having a good time and that's what this was all about in the first place.

* * *

I've made illustrations for work since I last posted but I fell from the habit of sharing them here. I've shown several on Twitter just because it's easier, y'know? I felt the impulse, wrote two sentences and tweeted I them out. But I've stopped doing that, too.

But blurting out the artwork in that manner diminishes the experience for me. I can't even recall the last drawing I launched into the void. Twitter has turned into a ephemeral stream of forgettable fragments. That's okay, I suppose; I guess that's what it's designed for.

I have a young daughter and in my more pensive moments I believe that a blog of my work, accompanied by some of my thoughts about it, would be a more substantive memento than a rat-a-tat spray of tiny images and abbreviated captions lost in a nearly unsearchable database. I might try to revive this blogging habit for that purpose.

Now I'll post this to twitter, too! Rat-a-tat!

Covid-19 comic

2020-04-05T15:47:00.000-07:00

This is the first comic page I've done in a very long time. It's nice to make one again. Hopefully this signals a return to that hobby. But I want a cheerier topic.

Drawn and colored in Clip Studio Paint on the iPad.
Open in a new window for a HUGE image.

The end.

Super Bowl 54 Special Section Cover

2020-02-03T16:33:00.002-08:00

Cover for the Super Bowl special section.

Clip Studio Paint on an iPad

Here is what it looked like in print:

Fending Off Bio Terrorism

2020-02-03T16:32:00.001-08:00

An illustration for a story about bioterrorism

Drawn with Clip Studio Paint on an iPad.

Here is how it looked in print:

asdasdadasdas

Just a Few Doodles

2019-10-21T18:13:00.000-07:00

Nothing serious. A casual sketch created during my daughter's ballet class; some heads I invented or loosely based on faces found on the internet.

Drawn on the iPad with Paper by WeTransfer –
my favorite app for sketching out in the wild.

Drawn with Clip Studio Paint
(and I still wish they'd change the name back to Manga Studio)

Drawn with Paper by WeTransfer

That's all for now...

Illustration Flurry

2019-09-11T09:12:00.000-07:00

Another small batch of illustrations I've made for the newspaper within recent memory. All art drawn in Clip Studio Paint with a dash of Photoshop.

Pollinating the Blog... With ART!

2019-08-18T12:18:00.000-07:00

I update the blog once in a while, just to see if it still sprouts viewers. Surveying the stats, it appears that 5-20 bots look at the blog every day. Once every month or two I'll get a few of days of 200-300 hits as a few people look around after I've posted artwork somewhere else.

There is much more activity when I post regularly, but I haven't done that in a long time. After I make a new post – and get a small charge from seeing my artwork up here on the internet gallery wall – I often feel inspired to make more; and that feeling fueled the frenzy of posts I made in the early years of this blogspot endeavor. I still get that feeling even now, but it has been dulled by the fall of the community that used to revolve around blogspot and by the understandable 14-year itch.

I drew these on my iPad in Clip Studio Paint. Four of the heads were referenced from random portraits
found on the internet, but I discarded the reference after I roughed in the features. The rest I free-styled.

I've mentioned this many times before but I often worry that my working life and the ennui that settles upon most of us as we grow older has dulled the joy of making art for pleasure. When I manage to make the time to draw, I enjoy dragging the pencil across the paper – I don't much care if the result is any good, I'm there for the experience and the thrill of the moment. The drawing itself usually underwhelms me but I feel better for having done it.

So, here are some underwhelming doodles sprinkled upon the dry soil of the blog. Perhaps some viewers will appear, and perhaps more art.

The End

Fast and Furious

2019-04-26T12:10:00.001-07:00

Here's an illustration for the April 21 Sunday front of the Mercury News and East Bay Times newspapers. Here is a link to the story about the lawyers behind the tech industry's H-1B visa boom, written by Leonardo Castañeda.

Drawn and colored with Clip Studio Paint.
Open in a new tab for a larger version

The concept was provided by the editors and below is the rough sketch. The wheel barrow was the first idea but it was superseded by the other one while I doodled.

The illustration did not stray from the rough, did it?

And here is what it looked like in print:

This is a pretty spare blog post so here'a a little something extra. Animated cupcakes!

The end

Want Out of the Bay Area?

2019-04-15T12:42:00.000-07:00

This illustration ran in the East Bay Times and Mercury News a couple of weeks ago. It appeared with an excellent story by Louis Hansen online and in print. It's nice living in the SF Bay Area, but it's also pretty hard. Expensive for the middle class, crowded, the worst traffic in the world, portions of it burn down every year... etc. The story clearly hit a nerve; 1,000+ dumb comments, which is pretty high for our site.

Drawn in Clip Studio Paint and mostly colored therein.
Also, a bit of Photoshop.

For this assignment I was encouraged to cartoon away. Forget the fancy illustratin'. Just doodle and slap down some color. Lots of fun!

Here's how it looked in print.

Below is the initial sketch. Didn't change much along the way, obviously.

The End

Pandora's Box is in the mail

2019-03-07T10:07:00.003-08:00

This illustration ran on the Bay Area News Group website and in print in their family of newspapers – Mercury News, East Bay Times – on Monday, March 4.

So, gene synthesis companies pretty much police themselves when it comes to who they send their product to. Sounds scary, but it sounds even scarier after you read this story by Lisa Krieger at the Mercury News website.

I created the illustration in Clip Studio Paint. We put the label across the bottom because we were uncertain the average newspaper reader would get it – Greek mythology might not be as in the mainstream as it used to be.

Seems the aging newspaper crowd would get it, while the younger readers might confuse it with the music streaming service. Why would they call it "Pandora" anyway?

The End.

Four Illustrations

2019-01-14T21:21:00.000-08:00

It sure had been busy at home and at work this past month. There has been comedy, there has been calamity. There has been illness and recovery, and a quick jump back to illness again. There has been holiday fun and the fearful terror wrought by a gushing water heater.

And I did a few illustrations for work. Here is what they looked like in the paper:

Open in a new tab to embiggen.

I might update the post later with more in-depth discussion for some of the illustrations, but then again I might not.

Social media for your neighborhood. Created in Illustrator (mostly.)

I'm going through another phase where I'm uncertain of my purposes of blogging. I've used the process in the past as a way to document my workflow, to leave a brief record of what/why/how I'm doing what I'm doing.

Best California Governors. Drawn in Clip Studio Paint and a little bit of Photoshop.

I've done it to force myself to think about my work by having to explain it. I'm not sure who I am explaining this to anymore. I mean, who reads blogs?

What to do with the castoff BART cars. Drawn in Clip Studio Paint.

But, as always, if you have any comments or curiosity about any of my efforts you can ask here or on Twitter.

Comparing costs between hospitals. Clip Studio Paint and Illustrator

The end.

Three Little Paintings, Plus One!

2018-12-10T15:30:00.000-08:00

I found three old thumbnail-ish doodles on the computer the other day. I made them several years ago. I was trying to get back into drawing and painting personal work for artistic growth and pure enjoyment – an effort I undertake from time to time – but on that particular occasion I only lasted about three days. "One little painting a day," I said. I sustained the pace for three days and I haven't seen them since.

Last week I stumbled upon them and – inspired for the moment – I decided that I would take up the task once more. "I'll finish the last panel – down in the lower right corner, still blank – and I will post them for all to see,” I said aloud. There was a cat perched on the shelf next to me and she seemed to nod in agreement, or maybe she was just cleaning her paws. Looked like a nod to me.

Painted in Clip Studio Paint and Photoshop. Open in a new window to embiggen.

I started the new thumbnail but made the mistake of looking critically at the ones already done and I decided that I really should fix them first. “After all,” I reasoned, “they're old, they no longer represent the artist that I am now; and besides, they aren't very good.” I’m my own second-worst critic; only my daughter dislikes my art more than me. She is never impressed.

Over a couple of days I spent several brief runs of “spare time” dolling up the old drawings and making a new one. I don't know that they were improved by the attention, but I did get to spend some time creating art, or whatever it is that they are.

At any rate, I intend to make this a regular thing once again! More regular than three days this time. I’m certain of it! Really.

The End

Three is Better Than One, I Hope!

2018-12-09T21:59:00.000-08:00

Three illustrations! I'm not motivated enough this evening to work up a separate post for each one but I'm in the mood to clear the deck. So, to get them out of the way – one of them has been lurking in my "draft" list for over a year – I'll just line them up and knock them down.

* * * * *

This was for a story about robots taking over the jobs of people at Amazon... I think. This is the one that's been lurking for a long time in my draft file. I can't find the pdf of the print version and a quick, half-assed web-search yields a bazillion stories about Amazon and robots and Amazon's underpaid, often shafted workers, but not this story. I shouldn't wait so long to post stuff!

Drawn in Clip Studio Paint and Photoshop, I believe.

* * * * *

The next illustration is for a story that ran just a week or two ago about the conspiracy theory consumers who have spent too much of their lives gazing into the abysmal internet and either pretend to believe or actually do believe some really stoopid crap. This time the deep-thinkers are sure that the California wildfires have been set by the secret cabal that includes the shadow government, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, and so on.

I don't know. How secret can any cabal be if it's got Zuckerberg in it? At any rate, the illumi-nutty are sure Zuck's got satellites armed with lasers so he can start forest fires in California to help him rule the world that he kind of pretty much rules already.

The story, by the Mercury News' great science writer, Lisa Krieger, is here. She is, as always, measured, mature and insightful. That's why she writes and use I crayons and make pictures. If I were to write that story I would use the adjective "stoopid" at least twice in every paragraph.

I'm not without sin; I am an eager audience for a good UFO or sasquatch story, but I don't believe any of that stoopid crap – well, I don't believe most of it. (Would anyone in 1967 think to put breasts on a gorilla suit, as seen in the Patterson film? That would have taken a mad kind of genius. But I digress.)

Drawn in Clip Studio Paint with a touch of Photoshop.

* * * * *

This ran in early November with a story by Erin Baldassari, and you can read her fun story here. The Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission hosted a competition for ideas to help ease the horrible traffic situation in the San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose areas. They received hundreds of submissions and Erin picks out some good ones that were a tad too outlandish work, although they might just the things to make it all better if life were more like a Looney Tunes cartoon.

Drawn with Clip Studio Paint & minor Photoshoppery.

That's all folks!

Rent Control

2018-11-29T06:00:00.000-08:00

This one was good fun! Somebody else came up with the concept, darnit, but I enjoyed the process of drawing it an awful lot. Two people, one long-term tenant with rent control and another person moving in next-door and he has to pay MUCH more than his neighbor.

It's one of those things where I can see both sides of the story. As a renter, I'm all for rent control. If I ever own a house (ha!) and decide to take on a tenant I'm going to vote against such silliness.

Drawn with Clip Studio Paint and little bit of Photoshop.

I based the character heads on two random people I found on the internet, although the drawings didn't end up looking much like the pictures. That's alright! I wasn't aiming for accurate portraiture; I was seeking inspiration so the characters didn't look like one of the fairly small stable of faces that appear when I draw out of my head.

It looks pretty good to me in print, altho I could've gone a touch wider with the drawing. I thought it would run four columns rather than stretching across the page. As they say: Sometimes you never know!

In print!

The end

PS: Since it's just sitting around and doing nothing in the folder with the final, here's the rough as submitted for approval, sketched after the concept was proposed.

The very end

Brown and Newsom

2018-11-28T19:00:00.000-08:00

There was much discussion about how to illustrate this assignment – how to show the contrast between outgoing governor Jerry Brown and his successor Gavin Newsom. I started a Mad magazine style drawing, but the story hadn't been written yet and so it was hard to commit to imagery without knowing what the writer was going to be focusing on.

Ultimately the decision was to do simple portraits – that was fine by me because there was a lot of other work to do and he deadline was pretty close; it definitely would have been a strain to cartoon and arrange a flurry of items signifying the differences between the two governors.

Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom drawn in Clip Studio Paint and a little bit of Photoshop

Of course the story ended up being postponed for about two weeks because the coverage of the fire in Paradise California bumped it down the road. But that's the biz.

I really like how it looked in the paper, as designed by the always fabulous Chris Gotsill.

The end

Leaving California

2018-11-27T15:00:00.000-08:00

This effort is similar to the 2018 NBA Finals Preview Section cover – in my previous post – in that it is another illustration where I didn't draw a thing. I took the California state flag symbol, blew it up a bit, filtered it and then vandalized it in the name of art.

This ran back in late 2017; another one of those things that I lost track of shortly after I finished it and so failed to mention it here. Make-up homework for the blog – too late for credit, but here it is!

I like how it was used in the paper. Good interaction with the headline.

The end.