Jeff Durham

Back-to-Back Illustrations

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

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

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.

My five-year old daughter drawing in our Art-studio (my 5 foot folding table in the corner)

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.

Another sketch of my kid during ballet class

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.

Two drawings by my daughter, iirc drawn while drinking hot chocolate in a coffee shop.

Still life with Ritz cracker, as seen on the ground at the regional park

We took turns drawing birds on a very cold day at the park.

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?

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...

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

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.