Not Measuring Up

Hey everybody. Wasn't it appropriate that the image that has been up for so long has been a rotten corpse? I think it is appropriate. No more of that.

Here is a big project that I did recently for Muse Magazine. It's not actually out until September, but I was given super-secret permission to put it up early. I think it turned out alright, considering what crazy time constraints I had one it. Here is a brief timeline of how it went down:

Thursday afternoon: meet art director John Sandford at Carus while traveling through the Midwest with Kali. Assignment is given. Assignment is due Monday. Oh god oh god.

Friday: Traveling. Oh god oh god.

Saturday: Ok start drawing.

Sunday: Oh god oh god.

Monday: Done.

End of timeline.

The article is about how the average height of a given nation is affected by so many different variables like wealth, healthcare, leisure time, etc. Here are drawings:


Opening, with some really nice design that the editors did. I didn't do the little B+W cartoons in this article. Could you tell?
Short person tall person. Again, good design all around makes my work look better than it has any right to look.


Those top two closer up, outside of the layout.
Left: America in the 1800s was a great place to live. Plenty of sweet wild game to make friends with and then eat.
Right: Lincoln / Douglas debate. Lincoln was way tall, Douglas a little shrimp. Guess who won the election?
Left and right: Money-stilts. These were on facing pages. Wealthy nations have a higher-than-average height.
Left: Flat-landers are naturally tall people. This dude is looking over his fields.
Right: Mountain folk are usually shorter. Surprise tea and turkey!
Here are some criminals of varying heights and badness.
The last page called for a big lineup of people of different heights. You may recognize a couple of them...like that Groucho robot and others. So these guys were all in a big row, but I separated them for easy viewing.

Because this project had such a short deadline, I sort of had to go with basically my first drawings -- a good and bad thing sometimes. One of the bad things is that these are all really, really tiny drawings in real life. That lineup of people is juuuuust about two inches high at the highest. The flat-landers/mountain-folk pieces are about 3.5 inches square, and everything else is of the same. Crazy.

I'm looking forward to doing some more work with Carus publications soon. Very soon. Also, I am hoping for some other clients. I have a big stack of postcards all written up and ready to go out to art directors, and I have a couple of things I have been working on on-and-off over the past few days, so stay tuned! There will be more pictures.