Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for The Weekly Standard

I'm sorry for the lack of posts, I have been very busy, traveling a bit, doing summer-type things with my family as well as working on various projects that I cannot share at this time. I'll have more to share here really soon. Thank you much for stopping by, I'll try to post more within the next few days.

So, this is a cover I did last week for The Weekly Standard, and No, I do not think Israel should bomb Iran, and I pray it never comes to that. I have many friends who live in Iran and know they want this Lunatic out of office as soon as humanly possible. I hope for their sake that Ahmadinejad will be removed . . . it's a sad and scary time for both Israel and Iran.

As for the creation of this cover . . . . well, it was interesting, that is for sure. Originally, The Weekly Standard commissioned me to do this cover three or four weeks ago. Unfortunately the news changed and they ran with a different story for that weeks cover and told me my cover would run in two or three weeks. This would be great in one sense, because unlike most deadlines for TWS I would have more than two days to paint their cover. I was excited about this, and thought I would have enough time to really pull out the big guns and do something absolutely killer! This is my 7th or 8th cover for them and most of them have been really rushed, so I wanted to take advantage of this situation.

Well, I ended up having to go out of town for a week, and then when I returned home, I got a call from UTNE Reader to paint a cover for them, due on the 16th of July. Same date that my cover for TWS was due. But I had two weeks, so I figured that would be enough time . . . BUT, on Wednesday night of that week, I was called by TWS and told that my cover had been dropped and would now be a full page illustration and on top of that, it was due within the next 48 hours. So I had to drop my sketching and so forth for UTNE Reader and focus all my energy on finishing the illustration for TWS.

Half way through working on it, I was called by TWS and was told that it will run as a cover but for next week . . . again due on the 16th, same day as my other cover . . . and because it was going to be a cover again, there were some changes that needed to be made.

Long story short, I had sketches and progress due for my UTNE Reader cover and on top of that I got the flu which set me back three days. So, doing two covers in one week turned out to be quite the challenge to say the least.

The UTNE Reader cover took me a lot longer that I had thought it would. I worked from 5:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. Monday through Wednesday and then finally finished around 1:00 p.m. on Thursday, only leaving me with a day and a half to finish my cover for TWS. So all in all, for the time and everything that was going on, I feel great about this cover. There are things about it that bother me, areas that I know could be stronger and so forth, but I'm still pleased with the final result and love my job . . . I wouldn't have it any other way.

Why am I sharing all of this with you . . . whoever you are that reads or follows this blog? I think it's important for you to know the reality of what I do, that it's not magic, and that circumstances are not always what I would prefer. You work with what you can . . . you do what you can to get the job done and you try to do the best that you can. Sometimes it can be stressful and chaotic, but in the end, it's all about delivering top quality.

I'll also attach some progress here for you to check out . . . have a great week and again, thanks for stopping by.




Detail of face and body . . . I had a lot of fun drawing and painting this guy . . . what a great face. It was a bit of a challenge because the topic is so serious. They wanted a caricature and they wanted humor, but it was a fine line of not going too far, but still being funny.



Head study.




One of my first really rough mock sketches . . .




The idea was slightly changed and this is a quick sketch I did to mock out the idea . . .




This is how the painting was developing when it was supposed to run as an illustration inside the magazine . . . once it was decided that it would actually run as a cover, we re-thought some things and started over with the pose and composition.