COUNTDOWN CITY

I finally finished a "Fan Art" image for Countdown City, the second book in the Last Policeman Novels by Ben H Winters. I took a few liberties with some of the staging but I hope I will be forgiven for that.

  The second book takes place in the heat of the summer,  so it was important to give this image a different feel then the first one.  The new image is more graphic. But hopefully captures the mystery mood from the books.

 The images aren't intended to read like a definitive sequence. I wanted them to represent different stages in the book but it is difficult to put images next to each other and not have your mind try and figure out the sequence...especially for comic book readers. 

Thanks to Ben and all the Quirk Books folks for all there praise and support.

Thanks for looking!

-Joe

IDEA GENERATING

Being a freelance Illustrator is not the easiest racket. I have to admit, I don't get paid editorial Illustration gigs nearly as much as I would like. That's why it is important (and satisfying) for me to play the art director and give myself illustration assignments.

The images generated on my own feel different to me than commissioned work. Sure they can sometimes lack the specificity that paid illustrations inherently have. Plenty of times the images can just fail... BUT the freedom to make my own changes and improvements is nice.

Flipping through my sketchbooks, I started selecting drawings to tighten up or use as inspiration to create fresh work.  Sometimes I don't really know what the sketches are about.  Is that important? Maybe not.
For instance the sketch below, "Night Of the Crocodile," is close to an image I did for a college assignment a long time ago. I think it was for an imaginary cuban restaurant menu. I had a big Studebaker driving toward a crocodile.

The cover was supposed to be cut paper and I completely missed the concept of cut paper and delivered a horrible image that was mostly glue and dirt.  I may have failed...but the composition wasn't bad. And although I have changed it considerably, I still dig it.  Looks like a mystery Novel cover.  It needs work but the seed is planted.