People in my neighborhood love this ice tea, and they love to leave empty cartons in the gutter. And on my front steps. I don’t love it.

Thumbnail sketches. We also have some opossums in the neighborhood. I haven’t seen any skulls around, but one will be on the poster too.

Sometimes I’ll do a more detailed sketch, but I just dropped the one in the upper right into Illustrator and started drawing in there. Before I start drawing I usually already know how the colors will work, even if I’m not certain of the composition. This one will be three colors, dark brown, gray, and pink. The gray and pink will overprint the brown to get two more colors. So I first draw all the shapes as the five colors (six with white) that they’ll appear in the end. That makes it easy to move pieces around and zero in on the composition. I end up changing it quite a bit from the sketch. Originally there were three cartons, now one, and I also considered some row homes and flowers in the background, but no. No point in really drawing the opossum fur in AI, so I just faked it and will fix it later.

When the composition is set I do a bunch of pathfinder-ing and get it back to three colors. I basically have some seps now. I don’t really like vector prints, so I printed out each color and will throw them on the light table to make new brush and ink seps.

I decided to modify the shadows on the paws a little. I’ll do the rest of the opossum separately and stick it all together in Photoshop, since it will probably take me a couple tries to get right.

What I ink with. I don’t think the stone is really meant to be used like this, but it works well.

The new inked seps. I’ll fill the large areas in Photoshop.

And some of the opossum. These are the second try, because as expected after I put the first try in PS it looked terrible.

These are 2/3 of final size, so they’re scanned at a high resolution and enlarged in Photoshop. After they’re enlarged I tighten up the registration a little in some spots, but I don’t get too picky about it, if I wanted it perfect I would have left them vectors. The fur was confusing with the overprinting and using some of the inks as masks, but I eventually ended up with:

Don’t have a lot of printing pics, because I was racing against daylight, and getting the ink transparency right takes a lot of trial and error. Color one:

Color two:

And finally three colors, all framed up for the show: