I got the call from The New York Observer asking me to create a cover illustration that centered on the problems many felt the New York Times were facing at the time. The idea of the illustration was to show the Publishers of the NY times on an old sinking row boat while their competition was a nice shiney expensive yacht. they also wanted to incorportate some of the up and coming web based sitels like gawker and buzzfeed and show them as the sharks that were about to really take a chunk out of the NY times business. This job was a ton of fun but also had its fair share of hurdles to jump, mostly in the form of a good composition.

.As stated before, the real issue was compostion. it was a challenge to get the boats, the shark fins  and both Andrew Rosenthal and Arthur Sulzberger all in the composition all while telling the story the art director wanted me to tell and getting a good strong likeness for both the main subjects. after a few sketches and small revisions this is the final version that got approved for finish.

After the sketch was approved i jumped into the painting stage. the majority of the time i dive right into painting with color, but with this i thought it would be best to establish all my values first and make sure the painting was working without any color. i was always taught value was more important than color and if the values were correct you could paint things almost any color you wanted. At this point ive mostly got all my values together and am ready to move into the final stage of adding color.

here is the final version after all the color and additional text had been added.