art critics

My craft project for the day was making this abstract expressionist masterpiece to illustrate a feature about two art critics: Clash of the Titans.

The "drawing" is just two particularly sloppy tracings. I composited my two reference pics in Photoshop and printed them out on cheap copier paper, then used the poor woman's lightbox (i.e., my office window) to trace the guys onto the back with a supersize Sharpie. On the first try, the guy on the right came out well but the one on the left was a bit too cubist, because it was a low-contrast photo and I had trouble following the contours. So I printed it out again, used a writing pen on the right side to trace the fainter outlines, and then repeated my tracing with the fat Sharpie from the wrong side. The second time, only the guy on the left was any good. So I mashed them together in Photoshop and then layered on the crap for the background. I'm heavily indebted to bittbox for these splatter brushes.

My office still reeks of Sharpie, four hours later.

Update 7/14: The World Jewish Digest has asked to reproduce this illustration for its own article about these guys. I don't get paid, since it's work I did on the job and therefore technically owned by Nextbook, but a credit is always nice. I see that they've also paraphrased my art direction for this article over here.