Kicking off 2020, I wanted to start working on a few personal projects for commissions that I've never received but that I've longed to do - and one of those projects has been to illustrate a cover for The New Yorker.

I visited NYC back in 2014 taking nearly 1000 photos, and from those reference I went through and picked 3 locations and illustrated a number of scenes before finally coming up with these covers.

www.newyorker.com
2020.

I started off by mashing up photos to create interesting compositions.
This really helped me to keep the art authentic but also flexible to interrupt it in my own way...

This was the first cover, Times Square.
In this cover, I took the Statue of Liberty colours and really experimented with the depth, shades, tone of that busy and vibrant environment - as well as highlighting my love for the comic book culture that comes from there too.

The second cover was based on my trip to the American Museum of Natural History.
In this cover, I wanted to highlight the diversity of the city by adding a gay couple at the front of this drawing. I always try to keep the characters in my work diverse and it felt right to have them in an embrace, walking around the museum.

The final cover was the New York Subway, which we spent a good amount of time on during the trip.
In this cover, I focused on how technology is now a constant distraction to us, and that so many internal conversations are going on without us even being aware.
This is a reflection of our culture now and it was the darkest illustration - tonally - out of the 3 drawings I made.


I hope to add more to this collection in the future.