For me, my favorite part of an illustration commission is going to the local Borders or Barnes & Noble and seeing the work on the stands. There’s something very gratifying about knowing that your work is communicating on a mass level. It occurred to me today on the way to Westmont that my cover for Stocks & Commodities Magazine was likely out now, so I stopped by Barnes & Noble, and there it was:

Okay, so it wasn’t really right out in front like that, I staged it for the photo. It was tucked in the upper right corner with all the other finance magazines. But still, it was there! I remember Greg Spalenka telling me back when I was a student that for an illustrator, the finished piece isn’t the completed painting, but rather the actual published version of the job.

I’ve been experimenting with digital painting for a while now, but this was my first published job that was painted digitally, using Corel Painter and Photoshop. It’s a technique I’ll keep in mind as a viable option for quick turnaround deadlines like this one, and seeing it in print reminded me of a few things I need to remember for the future: it’s so easy to get soft edges using Painter that I need to crisp up a few edges to make sure the whole image isn’t too diffuse, and I also need to watch out that my values don’t get too dark, because what looks vivid on an LCD monitor is going to dull down quite a bit with the dot gain that happens with offset printing. All that said, I was fairly pleased with how it turned out, and the nice thing about working digitally is that you don’t have to worry about any color distortions being introduced during scanning, as so often happens with my traditionally-painted illustrations. Overall, this was probably about the most accurate reproduction I’ve seen yet for my work.