Want Out of the Bay Area?

This illustration ran in the East Bay Times and Mercury News a couple of weeks ago. It appeared with an excellent story by Louis Hansen online and in print. It's nice living in the SF Bay Area, but it's also pretty hard. Expensive for the middle class, crowded, the worst traffic in the world, portions of it burn down every year... etc. The story clearly hit a nerve; 1,000+ dumb comments, which is pretty high for our site.

Drawn in Clip Studio Paint and mostly colored therein.
Also, a bit of Photoshop.

For this assignment I was encouraged to cartoon away. Forget the fancy illustratin'. Just doodle and slap down some color. Lots of fun!

Here's how it looked in print.

Below is the initial sketch. Didn't change much along the way, obviously.

The End

Texas vs. California

Hey! Found this the other day. It is my very first op-ed illustration, done for the Oakland Tribune back in 2001. I believe the story was about the growth of Texas in relation to California at the time; population, business opportunities, some tech companies moving for tax reasons, etc.

Drawn on actual paper, with pencil and pen. The white swirlies in the water were done in photoshop and are among my first lines drawn digitally. Weird how things have changed.

Gosh, I really wanted to do op-ed illustrations and cartoons, and I did for a couple of years, but that particular career is pretty much dead. The editorial cartoonist and illustrator is almost a mythical beast at this point; there are more Bigfoot sightings than editorial cartoonist sightings.