Rolling Stones Tickets Are Hella Expensive

Here's my effort at an illustration for Jim Harrington's fine story about concert ticket prices. If you read the story I must warn you that the next time you exit the subway and pass by that old guy sitting on a bucket playing an erhu, you might feel compelled to drop at least a 20 in the cup. After all, you're getting front-row, v.i.p. access to live music performed by someone over 70.

Open image in a new window for a GIANT! version. It's much easier to see the sloppy handiwork.

Below are four screenshots of the illustration in progress.

Top left: My rough idea sent to the editors for approval. A hopefully amusing play on the audience-raising-lighters-at-a-concert shtick, with one guy in the foreground burning money representative of the amount of a ticket. The editors liked it, but wanted more people burning money. Dang. That means drawing more hands doing different things.

Top right: Mick and Keith line drawings -- at this point I wasn't crazy about Mick's likeness, but I hoped to fix it during the coloring process.

Open in new window for a bigger picture, if you're that interested.

Bottom left: I started filling in the flat colors behind the linework after the long slow grind of drawing hands. I had also drawn hands holding money, but they were on hidden layers; I kind of preferred the visual joke of having just the one pair of hands lighting the money, and kept this as an option in case it was later decided to go that direction.

I did re-use a hand or two, but redrew a few fingers on each so it wasn't so obvious.

Bottom right: Here the rendering began. Mick's face started to look better after this, although I'm still not happy with how the final looked, but deadlines will be deadlines. At the last minute I decided I didn't care for the big, bare fore-arms right up front, so I put some sleeves on them, probably with a bit too much haste. The coloring helps, but they look more like tubes than sleeves.

Also, at the very last minute I put frets on Keith's guitar. No time for strings, tho!

And here is what it looked like in the paper, on a page designed by Scott Swyres:

Don't bother clicking, it doesn't get any bigger.

The end