I don’t always document my creative process, but when I do it seems like a good idea to share it. This particular cover illustration was for the Helena Vigilante‘s election issue.

We (the Vigilante editor & I) started out chatting about people from the two political parties being divided by some sort of a large crack or crevice, perhaps with a few people bravely daring to cross the dangerous divide.

Then I suggested making the cracks into the animals from the political parties, sketching this on my iPad.

drawn in 53 paper

After checking that the blue and red fuzz on top of the animals would eventually be people, the idea was a go.

I then whipped up this sketch to get an idea of what the style would feel like. I wanted it to have a kind of gritty pen & watercolor feel and came up with this:

Not super accurate, but it helped be figure out a feeling for the texture.

Next it was time to do a high quality sketch of each animal so I could start working with them digitally.

One detailed elephant (in oil pastel)

Somewhere in here the people fell out of the picture and I ended up with just the animals.

annnd a detailed donkey

After I worked my magic in Illustrator, this was the final result!