Our Forum Member Resident Artists

[TheIronMonkey]

I was reluctant to share this, but, my girlfriend said, "Why not?"

 

[Laurent]

Here’s some of my paintings

 

[TheIronMonkey]

I was reluctant to share this, but, my girlfriend said, "Why not?"

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I posted the double gatefold magazine cover above (a first ever for Sports Illustrated in their 50 year history at the time). There's a more detailed version without the logo you can view that was posted by the Design Director of the magazine here.

This was an unusual job for me. I had mostly done humourous illustration and caricatures for magazines during my illustration career. This is more realistic and is the only illustration I've won awards for; it also got into the Society of Illustrators show that year, but didn't win any medals. The project was a massive undertaking and took about six months of full time work to complete (I learned that Photoshop had a 30,000 pixel limit). I sort of fell into the illustration by accident. I had been doing a lot of work for the magazine and was dropping off boxes of Godiva chocolate for the art department around Christmas. I was sitting in a chair when the Design Director passed by and asked if I knew anyone who could paint the Sistine Chapel. He saw the look of surprise on my face and explained the 50th Anniversary of the magazine was coming up and he wanted to commission an illustration of the entire ceiling replaced with sports figures. I said, "That's nuts." He replied, "Yeah, but, isn't that great?" I thought for a second and recommended a couple of illustrators who worked in styles fitting of the Renaissance. He said, "Hmm. That's interesting," and walked away. After he left, I thought, "Gee, 50th Anniversary—that's a pretty big deal. Maybe I should try for this." I knew working on paper would be too cumbersome, but, I had been working digitally for about four years at that point and thought, if I could do it on the computer, it might be possible. When he passed by a little later, I asked him if it needed to be done on paper or could it be a digital file. He said, "I don't care, as long as I can print from it." I told him I'd be interested. He said, "Really? . . . Okay, do a sample over the holidays. Let's see what you come up with."

I digitally painted Dennis Rodman as a naked sibyl and e-mailed it in January. I didn't hear anything.

It was February. I ran an online digital art forum back then and was going to post the sample explaining how I had tried out for the gig. Just as I was about to hit "Submit" the phone rang. The magazine liked the sample and wanted to discuss doing the project. At the time Sports Illustrated took up two floors in the Time-Life Building. I went into the meeting in their huge conference room. It was filled with art directors, writers, editors, fact checkers, etc., and a nearly three foot stack of reference material was on the table. They had scripted the entire piece, finding sports parallels to the ceiling images and asked if I could get it done by August for the cover of their 50th Anniversary coffee table book. I told them I had never done anything that big. Why don't I do a section and I could figure out how many square inches I needed to fill based on how much time it took. I worked on a corner that week and calculated that I could get it all done in time.

The magazine got nervous about using the art as the dust jacket because God was depicted, and they didn't want to offend anyone, so it ended up as a foldout in the book. But, they loved it so much, they used it as the cover of the magazine for their Anniversary issue that September. I did a competent job on an extraordinary project, which was good enough to come off as something quite special. I'm proud to have worked on something so special.