Tangled In Blue

Several weeks ago, Justin Long of Orange Coast Magazine emailed me to offer a feature in the magazine about the relationship between drugs and surfing culture. I grew up in the part of Southern California where the story takes place, so I was pretty happy to do the job.

These first two images are of the amazing layout that Justin did with the illustrations. I think it’s one of the finest jobs someone has done laying out my artwork to date, and am happy that he’s given me the OK to post them here. You can click on either one of the spreads to see the illustrations enlarged.

I wanted to be a little more subtle but still have an emotional impact on the opening illustration. This can be a really tricky thing, since people are usually flipping through a magazine pretty quickly. I was pretty adamant about not wanting to show any obvious drug references, but was also concerned that the surfboard leash wrapped around the figure’s wrist would be too subtle. Fortunately, Justin agreed that this solution would work.

I re-drew this basic pose several times, but it wasn’t working. I could have just toughed it out, but I decided to totally scrap this pose and start over. It’s a tough thing to do sometimes, because you usually want to stay somewhat close to your initial sketch, and it’s easy to get lost in trying to make it work. You have to art direct yourself a lot of the time, though that’s sometimes very hard to do.

Finally, I came up with a pose for the underwater figure that I was happy with. The illustration before this point was starting to make me really anxious, but when I had the insight to switch it up, I knew I could do a good job on it, and could focus on the colors.

Lastly, here are some screen shots I took while trying to work out the color.

Thanks for reading!

frank