This week’s assignment: read this New York Times article from 1987 and come up with an illustration. It starts with jotting down your own short summary to wrap your mind around what the article is fundamentally about. My take on this article:

Walter Mitty is real: a small but significant portion of the population are happily spending more than half their lives in a fantasy world.

The next step is to fill a page or three with quick idea sketches. The idea is not to create a great drawing, but to come up with a concept or composition that tells a story.

After deciding on this one, I did another series of small sketches to come up with a composition I liked. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, solving problems at the thumbnail stage saves a lot of frustration in the drawing stage. I think I still have a lot to learn about color and contrast, but this approach has really taken most of the pain out of the drawing process.

By the way, I have no idea why my first two illustrations for this class involved the subway. It wasn’t intentional–I’d rather walk any day of the week!