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.