I Draw Pictures All Day

I wish that was the case. I have a button I wear on my lapel at school that sarcastically announces just that… but I do enjoy teaching others how to draw pictures, all day.

My job as a freelance illustrator gives me a lot of opportunities to work on a number of different projects, sometimes three or more simultaneously. I have illustrated jobs that are pretty interesting, but there are a number of assignments involving subjects that some would consider rather prosaic or even a little odd. One of the last jobs I finished kind of overlaps both of those descriptions; I thought I’d post examples of the job from start to finish with some explanations of the process.

This job was for Faces magazine, an educational monthly for students in grade school. I have done work for them in the past that included illustrating how a skyscraper is constructed, instructions on how to speak phrases in French, and how an airplane flies. This short one-page article was about Polser, or Danish Hotdogs. Hmm…Danish Hotdogs? I guess features about glaciers or explaining how a Bill becomes a Law have become boring and passé… none the less, I’m happy to get the work, and I’ve already illustrated articles about glaciers and how Bills become Laws. Sometimes these educational articles can be quite boring, so much it can seem like glaciers and Bills becoming Laws move at the same speed.

In a publication like this, illustrators are used primarily to create images that will attract kids to read one of those somewhat boring articles, or when a suitable photo can not be found to accomplish that task. This is why I have drawn illustrations of more than a few glaciers and Bills becoming Laws. Given the photo reference supplied to me by the Art Director for this story on Polser, I think it is pretty apparent why they decided a humorous illustration was a better choice than the photo.
The photo is rather humorous in itself, but not the type of humor I think teachers want introduced into the class room while trying to involve the students in a discussion of fast food in other lands.

Besides the photo, the art director also provided me with a layout and a headline, showing the space allotted for the illustration and the display font chosen for the headline. Other than that, the assignment is “come up with something better than this awful photo”.

The first step in creating an illustration is to sketch up thumbnail roughs. The article mentions that Polsers are served from Polsemandens. Some research (Google images) showed that Polsemandens are pretty much identical to the aluminum Greasewagons used in Philadelphia to serve everything from cheese steaks and pretzels to gyros and falafel. And of course, hot dogs. One is usually parked right outside my work place in Philly, so getting reference for a Polsemanden is not a difficult task. The Art Director for this assignment always includes a note to use “children around 10 years of age, multi ethnicity, and bright colors”. She is pretty good about letting me do what I think looks best, and usually approves my sketches as long as they fit in the space she allotted me without having to juggle the text around too much.
In other words, almost all the assignments I get as a freelancer could be accompanied by a note like this: “here’s an article about __________(in this case, that blank is filled in with “some weird looking hotdogs”). I didn’t write it, so don’t complain to me about the content. We’re paying you to draw something good, so that’s what I want; I want it on time, I want it to fit in the space, and I’ve got a zillion other things to do, so I can’t hold your hand while you come up with something. “
So I sit down and start my thumbnail roughs.

But before I start the thumbnail roughs, there is another task, and sometimes it is the hardest part of these assignments: reading the article itself. A one page article about Danish junk food shouldn’t be that difficult, but when I get something like this I suddenly feel like I’m back in grade school and I’d rather do ANYTHING than read this article and write a report on it. Or in this case, create an illustration about it. However, it’s much easier to get tasks like this accomplished when you’re getting paid for it.

Hmm.. an illustration of multi ethnic middle-school aged kids wearing bright colors enjoying odd looking hotdogs in a Scandinavian setting…well, a few swipes and circles on the paper is a good start. I always start with a few circular shapes, blocking things in, trying to present elements from the article in the most direct manner but not give away too much of the content at the same time… here’s my first thumbnail sketches:

Recalling my own junior high school days, and what pictures in our text books were altered with a ball point pen to amuse classmates, I thought it was probably not a good idea to show anyone holding these phallic shapes to open mouths or biting down on them; however, illustrating them enjoying them is necessary.

After my first few sketches I thought flipping the composition would be a better page layout, so I flopped the rough thumbnail over on my light table in my studio and made a better drawing. A word here about “thumbnail sketches”: traditionally, these are intended to be just little sketches of ideas on paper. If an art director supplies a thumbnail to me for a job, I often receive markings on a piece of paper resembling cave drawings. The better ones sometimes to have a vague sort of organization, but are usually stick figures that are more sticks than figures. My thumbnails sketches begin more as shapes, with little hints of expression and gesture added. And I usually keep building on one that I feel would work as an illustration, so most of my thumbnail sketches keep developing into what others may refer to as “rough sketches” right on the same sheet of paper. So here is my flopped-over rough thumbnail sketch for the Polser article:


Considering how odd this sausage like snack looks compared to our American hot dogs, I thought it might be nice to add some nomenclature to the Polser itself, including the condiments applied to the weiner (…I noticed that the word “weiner” is not used anywhere in this article) So, I added a diagram, and a hungry looking kid who appears to find the notated toppings and main course savory and irresistible. Trying to work in a female figure as well, I drew a young girl enjoying a hot Polser fresh from the Polsermanden ( the wagon itself, not the guy inside making them). Given that I would like to feature bright colors, I thought it would be nice to give the young lady feasting on this Danish delight a retro-70’s look with some pattern on her outfit.

I’m really lousy drawing appropriate clothing, especially on females. One complaint from an art director was most of the clothing I draw on characters looks too 1980s. Gee, I always thought of my fashion sense as “classic”. I have never been what you may call a clothes horse, or a slave to fashion; I may buy clothing once or twice a year and then it’s usually purchased from the marked-down rack at The Gap or J.C. Penny. I rely on my wife, daughters, or students at school to give me an idea of what is hip or appropriate for clothing the subjects in my illustrations. The advice from my students is dicey, however; when you teach at an all-women’s art and design college that includes courses ranging from fashion design to metal sculpture, you see some pretty interesting fashion statements. You'll see some girls wearing ripped jeans and shirts from a designer boutique they paid a premium for, and some fine arts students wearing nearly identical items. The difference is the fashion students spent hours shopping for theirs, and the fine arts students just happened to tear their jeans and sweatshirts while salvaging pieces of metal for their next sculpture project from a dumpster behind the scool.
Once I’m satisfied with the layout and placement of elements in the composition, I put another piece of tracing paper over it and finalize a rough sketch. This is the one I will send to the art director, so I make it look as close to the final as possible. I also use a pencil to indicate value, giving me an idea of negative and positives within the illustration, When I start on the first thumbnails, I’m sketching shapes and lines but thinking about the negatives and positives within the composition, and where I will eventually add color. I learned a lot studying the cartoon illustrations of Will Eisner (creator of The Spirit) and Wally Wood (who at one time ghosted for Eisner on The Spirit ), but also have picked up a lot by looking at the classic illustrations of N.C. Wyeth and Norman Rockwell. As Yogi Berra once said, “You can observe a lot just by looking”.


Using the miracle of Photoshop on my studio laptop, I can scan the drawing I completed and place it into the jpeg of the layout provided by the art director. I often resize elements within my sketch at this point to make things fit better. I have to allow for the artwork to get cut off at the edge of the page (the bleed, we call it) , so I sometimes need to draw a little extra background or something that I know will most likely get trimmed off during the printing process.


Hopefully, the artwork gets approved by the Editors without too many changes, and I can start the final. I take a printout of the file I sent to the art director, enlarge it 25%, and do a finished illustration by placing another piece of tracing paper over it and doing a neat, clean, rendering with a #2 drawing pencil. I do not add in any value or shading at this point, but I do make adjustments to the people and elements within the illustration.
I then scan the finished neat, clean rendering and adjust the contrast using Photoshop. I used to put my approved roughs on a light table and then do an inking over them with a brush and ink, but I was covering up a lot of nice spontaneous pencil work that way; this technique makes my pencil lines appear to be inked, and keeps a little more energy in my final illustration. Nowadays my original illustrations are pencil drawings on tracing paper.

I do a quick color comp using colored pencils on a printout of my approved rough before I do any final colors, creating a “color map” to refer to when I do the final illustration. Making color decisions on the final art, even when it’s digital, is inviting a mess of values and colors.
I decided to use a red-yellow-green color scheme throughout, to pick up the color of the Polser and the red, yellow, and green of the ketchup, mustard, and pickle toppings. Also taking into account the fork and globe graphic that will be used on the page, I decided to make the business man placing an order for a Polser wear a blue suit and added blue into the sign on the front of the Polsemanden.

So working with the adjusted scan of my final artwork, I switch the property of the Photoshop layer to “multiply” and then start blocking in large shapes of color underneath. The color fills in area under the black line work of my drawing, and I simply fill all my shapes with flat colors, similar to using crayons in a coloring book. I’m even careful to stay within the lines…


After I have all the areas flat-colored, I can select the areas and use the airbrush and gradient fill tools in Photoshop to give the illustration more life. I sometimes work in several layers, with the sky and the green of the bushes and grass underneath the main characters. I try to take into consideration a light source and other colors that may appear in the shadows or sky, much like I do when I paint with oils or watercolors.

Finally, I have a finished digital illustration that I can send to the Art director. I usually flatten all the layers, create a jpeg, and send it as an email attachment. The artwork is sized digitally so the art director can simply drop it into place using the design program they are creating the magazine with.
(When I get the printed piece back in September I'll scan it and post it up here...)

I have found that I almost never hear from Art Directors after I deliver a job unless there is something wrong with the illustration or an editor has asked for a change. After all, they have a zillion things to do, and if I can give them an illustration on time that they can simply drop into place, they have one less task to complete. Hopefully, they will show me their appreciation for meeting the deadline by giving me another assignment. I’m pretty good at drawing illustrations of glaciers and Bills becoming Laws…
-Posted by Rich Harrington

The Last Day of Winter

Posted by Rich - Where I come from, the last day of winter and the first day of spring are usually pretty similar to the days we experience in the middle of the winter. The first day of spring in Upstate NY was typically pretty cold with noticeable accumulations of snow still on the ground and large piles of dirty, hard packed ice acting as a miniature Continental Divide in most shopping center and mall parking lots. We would observe the calendar notation of the first day of spring still dressed in hats and gloves and boots, but also with a careful low-level excitement. You did not want to jinx the arrival of warmer weather by wearing shorts on a 40-degree day, or playing basketball outside in the icy puddles on the school playground. You always had to be careful; if the Gods of the Seasons noticed you were not paying Winter it’s due respect, then you could get zapped with a late April snow storm, or experience cold, rainy weather through Memorial Day.

So we would patiently bide our time, daring sometimes to wear your snorkel jacket unzipped or a baseball hat in place of a knit cap, but trying not to be too blatant. Sometimes, you would become confident enough that Winter was ending and not even bother to look for the glove or mitten you lost. And if you did lose a glove, it was always the left hand one- always- that went missing. At this time of year I usually had and still have 3 or four unmatched right-handed gloves of different colors and materials.

But still you waited, carefully, and watched for the signs of Spring. That first day of just rain, for instance, that made things sloppy but melted enough snow to reveal green lawns not seen since last Thanksgiving. Or the first 50 degree day you could walk home from school and notice that the snow banks you had climbed over for months were gone or not nearly as large as they had been, and the sidewalk and streets looked noticeably wider as the glacial piles of shoveled and plowed snow slowly receded. The occasional faint smell of earth, dirt, ground, unfrozen mud, whatever you may call it, gave afternoons a promise of warmer weather that would arrive and stay until summer ended.

Then it came, the TRUE First Day of Spring for us: It was marked as the first sunny afternoon you got your bike out. You may have had a jacket on still, and long pants, but when you could wheel your 20 inch two wheeler out of the back of the garage and feel the freedom of riding once again, then you felt Spring finally had arrived. On the First True Day Of Spring, you can take off that jacket and not have to hear your Mom yell at you to put it back on before you catch a cold. Toys you may have received as Christmas gifts could finally make an appearance outside. The baseball bats and gloves came out in the sunshine. Kids would spontaneously appear at the field behind the grade school and start hitting and throwing. Of course, you had to be careful of the remains of snowdrifts in left field stubbornly hanging on towards the shady side of the school building, and the gooshy ground behind third base. However, none of this dampened the absolute joy you felt playing in the warmth of the sun and the promise of longer days in the coming months. You knew in the back of your mind it could turn cold again tomorrow, the wind and rain could blow hard, and it could quite possibly even snow again once or twice.

This weather change could almost certainly be attributed to some kid, some where, who annoyed the Weather Gods by wearing shorts or acting too summerish too quickly and ignoring the fury Winter could still muster if provoked. But on this, the True First Day of Spring, it was the day you got your bike out of storage in the back of the garage and rode the newly widened spaces of the sidewalk and streets wet with melting snow banks. This was the day to forget about knit hats and lost gloves. Who could be blamed for getting excited that summer was on it's way, and jump the gun a little by wearing shorts? In retrospect, however, I probably should have put my jacket back on when my Mom told me to.

Is it me, or is that snow bank taller than average..?

Like most natives of the Snowbelt, I feel a strong obligation to document the snow fall amount, whether it be through photos, drawings, or verse. I think it may harken back to our days as grade schoolers, when exasperated teachers tired of helping students put on and take off layers of winter clothing and boots for recess. Eventually, they would just announce that we were staying in that day and making paper snowflakes or drawing pictures about winter instead of trudging outside into the cold once again.

Upon his retirement in the early 1990s, my Father used his newly acquired video camera to make a record of the snowfall he had battled all winter long . The resulting tape could easily be shown in any art-house cinema as an avante-garde short subject, and it is my opinion that it would certainly be awarded an “A” if it was submitted as a final project by a student majoring in film at a university. The entire video lasts over 5 minutes, and begins with a wide shot of our modest 1950’s ranch house in Utica NY surrounded by snow drifts. As this was the first winter my Father was fully retired, the driveway and walks are scraped down to their bare macadam and flagstone surfaces respectively, and the snow is piled impeccably along the drive and walkways. There is no sound except for the wind blowing through the subdivision, and the middle of the afternoon on a weekday in February contributes to the lonely Edward Hopper look of the subject. The sound of my Father’s feet crunching on the snowpack of the street can also be heard as he approaches the house and pans the large mounds of snow on both sides of the driveway and surveys the walk way excavated to our front door. I can’t imagine WHY he shoveled the front walk so neatly and invitingly, as anyone who knocked on the front door would hear “Go around to the side door!” yelled to them from the inside. The video continues with a view of that same side door, and then moves into the backyard and all the way around the family room and bedroom added on in the 1970s, takes long views of the tall snow drifts obscuring the clothesline poles in our backyard, examines the snow carefully piled up around our back walk, and finally reaches the back door. There is no sound except for the wind, the sounds of my Father breathing as he steps and films at the same time, and an occasional muttering of ”Will ya look at that snow” as he completes this long, continuous documentation of the winter’s accumulation. The initial screening of this short subject took place at a family gathering right after it was made, and was promptly dubbed ‘The Harrington Drift Project” by my brother and sister in law. The only thing this video lacked was something to place the drifts and piles in proper scale, which is understandable since all five children in my family had long since grown up and moved out by the time my father retired. I learned at an early age that by positioning a small child in front of a snow drift, you can help persuade disbelievers that it was indeed a heck of a lot of snow you were shoveling that particular winter. Over the years, my brother, three sisters and I often posed in our snow suits in front of the large drifts in my back yard for a snapshot each winter. It of course helps that members of my nuclear and extended Harrington family seem to be shorter than average in height. The Great Blizzard of 1966 was made to look even more impressive by the fact that none of the five children in my family were over age 11 or over 5 foot tall at the time. This short stature goes back generations on mother’s side as well as my father’s, and may help to partially account for our desire to document tall piles of snow. Looking back through family photo albums reveals different generations of photographs, some sepia toned, some shot with a Polaroid, and now some digital, of young Harringtons standing in front of a pile of snow. I often used my own children as this scale prop when I felt moved to make a pictorial record of the season. Somewhere in North America, there is a branch of the Harrington family that averages over 6ft tall when fully grown. I doubt any of them live in the snowbelt, and if they did, they would probably find winter even more intolerable without being able to pose in front of large snow drifts and the small mountains at the end of the driveway towering over their heads.

Perhaps the author and illustrator Virgina Lee Burton had children that were above average in height, so her documentation of a large snow fall had to be in the form of a children’s book about a powerful snow plow. Given she was born and raised in New England, it seems likely that “Katy and the Big Snow” is based on an actual snow storm, and with her above average-height children to clear the end of the driveway for her, she could devote time to writing a children’s book about a little snow plow and drawing pictures of the tractor in front of a oversized snow bank. The magnitude of the storm certainly impressed me when I read it. I think it helped that Katy was smaller than average.


Notice in this pic my dog Maggie used for scale... and she is about average in size..


Here where I live in Newtown Borough, instead of Katy, a red 1956 International Harvester dump truck is used to clear the snow. I love seeing it being used, and even when it plugs up the end of my freshly shoveled drive way with a large mountain of snow, it is hard to shake your fist and curse at the life-sized Buddy-L truck that just drove down your street. And just like Katy, this Buddy-L has a job to do. Unlike Virginia Lee Burton, I am not moved to write and illustrate a children’s story based on the snow plowing exploits of a 1956 International Harvester (unless I was given an advance from a book publisher , that is..!). I AM, however, inspired to create some paintings based on this red mechanical marvel that growls up and down my street with a flashing yellow light on top. So, here are the works in the preliminary stages; I will post other progress pictures as I complete work on the pieces. I only hope I made the truck look really big, so when July rolls around I can show the painting and tell people “Yep, I shoveled out the end of the driveway after that monster rolled by…and by the way, here’s a photo of me standing in front of a snowdrift back in the Blizzard of 1966…” (Posted by Rich)


Hopefully, I can get these drawings turned into paintings by July...

Barking Beagles!

I had a beagle once- a dear sweet dog, she was always happy, and most happy when she was eating something. Often it did not seem to matter to her WHAT she was eating, as long as it fit down her gullet in 2 or 3 large bites before I could get it away from her. She was also very happy when sniffing or barking, and she alternated quite easily between these two activities. She often multi-tasked this with great efficiency as well, especially when a client visited my studio, and hence the name "Barking Beagle Studio" came about. There seemed to be a number of Richard Harrington's working as freelance illustrators at the time, so I took advantage of the adorable but noisy little pup I picked up off the streets of Syracuse to help with my identity crisis; I became the Richard Harrington With The Dog. She inspired me to create the image above...(Posted by Rich Harrington)