Seattle Met: "Diary of a Deadly Year"

Last month, I had the opportunity to work on an illustration for the Seattle Met Magazine's November Issue on an article about a sudden spike in murder rates in Yakima County, Washington in 2010.  The illustration's job was to both narrate a specific attack as well as convey the tone of shock from the string of 29 killings in a population of only 89,000.

Below are sketches we worked through to develop the direction (the first couple thumbnails in this case were done on my phone) and the final artwork and headline treatment from the magazine by André Mora and Chris Skiles, which is on stands now.

Watercolor sketchbook

I've been trying to keep entirely to watercolors in the sketchbook recently and it's been one of the toughest/best teachers in terms of letting go and reacting to the subject and paints. Here are a few pages from past couple months.

Jan/Feb Sketchbook

I've finally had the opportunity to do some life drawing again over the past few weeks, which has been really good/daunting to begin practicing again (especially in a workshop with natural light.) Here are some of the sketchbook pages, the first two using a brushpen, then crowquill and wash on the next few, and then watercolor on the last one. (If anyone has any advice on working with watercolor vs. short poses, or a source for portable heat-ray, please let me know.)