Process: From Rough To Final
Let’s walk through the process for this illustration I did for The Literary Review of Canada, for a piece by Stacey May Fowles on David MacFarlane’s book, On Sports.
Scan of the issue.
Specs Breakdown! Illo size: 5.7” × 3.2” in black and white. With a very manageable 1 week lead time for roughs and 1 week for finals.
At this point, I read the piece a few times, take notes, and let it sit around in my brain for a bit. This is the luxury a longer timeline allows. Thinking time. Then I come back to it and start sketching. I do most of my submitted roughs in Procreate, but they all start in the brainstorming phase on paper with markers or ink. If I don’t do the paper step, the rest of the steps don’t tend to work. You must trust the process! And this part of the process is about making quick bad drawings to (hopefully) flesh out a couple of starting points. Here are a few examples of drawings that will graduate to stage 2 in one way or another:
The book is about being a Sports Fan and the kinds of feelings and challenges being a fan can provoke, experienced through Stacey’s lens as a Blue Jays fan.
I came to love the Jays in the same era as Stacey did and could relate to many of her experiences. This is actually very rare in my illustration assignments! Usually I’m learning about something for a brief moment, doing a lot of research, without much personal history. But I’ve been in those same seats, and I’ve loved the team when it was kinda shit, and I’ve snuck closer to home when the dome was dead, and I’ve personally owned a black angry Jays hat. I’ve also been one of the people in sketch 2 below when I went to a Jays game this year - had the time of my life, but it cost a fortune. So these roughs were all pretty fun to draw due to personal fandom.
Note to illustrators: I normally only submit 2-4 sketches, but I’ve been working with Kyle Wyatt for YEARS now, and I feel very free to go overboard with him.
Rough #4 was selected. Time to bid adieu to the fallen ideas and move forward. As you can see, I combined 2 sketches to create the “final” sketch, and now it’s time to turn it into the final illustration.
Sometimes working in B&W can be a big challenge, especially when a scene like this could so easily be explained in colour, and I’ve experimented with how I do it a lot over the years. I wanted this illo to portray how the sense of wonder and joy in sports fandom can transcend the annoying ads (and people) all around us when the game is good. When the game is good, the person who just spilled something on you is also your best friend. It’s the best. It’s what keeps you coming back to live sports.
Final illustration.
PS: Jays fans in the know will recognise Trey Yesavage’s customary pitching frown…