Rent Control

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!

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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.

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Brown and Newsom

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.

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Leaving California

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.

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NBA Finals (again)

This was a cover I created for the San Jose Mercury News/East Bay Times NBA Finals Preview Section. I wasn't very fond of it when I did it but, half a year later, it looks alright to me. Initially I was going to do a drawing as I have in the past for the other Warriors Finals appearances, but maybe I was tired of drawing LeBron, Steph, etc. It's really remarkable that it was the same showdown four years running, but it seemed tedious at the time.

Top to bottom, I used the photos of D Ross Cameron, Nhat V. Meyer – staff photographers for the Bay Area News Group at the time – and AP's Morry Gash.

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PS: Ha! I just found this in the folder with the cover image file – for a very short minute we were going to try to tie the Finals in with Star Wars somehow, so I came up with a quick collage rough for that. Clearer heads prevailed (as in wtf were we thinking?) and NBA Finals Episode IV was the sequel that never came to be. Probably one glance at Yoda Klay killed that whole idea. Gah. I like that Death Star basketball in the background, tho.