The silk screen project I blogged about last week is being temporarily put on hold while I work on a new assignment - an illustration for Flannery O'Connor's short story, A Circle in the Fire. Have you ever read it or any of O'Connor's other work? Her most famous short story is A Good Man is Hard to Find, which I'd read at least 10 years ago and had trouble processing at the time. I find her work pretty dark, almost nihilistic, but it makes for plenty of interesting tension-filled imagery. I also really enjoyed getting to draw scrappy, contempt-filled boys in a 1950's Southern farmland environment, since it's a little different from my usual subject matter.

Anyway, I was pretty happy with how my sketches turned out for this story, so I thought I'd put them up here. In the next couple of weeks, I'll know which one has been chosen for the final image, if there are changes, etc, and bring in a little bit of color. I really want to work on retaining the line-quality of the sketches in my final for this project and trying to use limited color in a way that's more in line with my typical sketchbook work. We'll see how it all turns out. In the meantime....

Oh, normally I'd include client information in a post like this, but since the assignment is currently in process and could still get changed or killed, I'm going to hold off for now. I will say that it's a client I very much enjoy working with and it could turn into a much bigger assignment if all goes well. Exciting! Also, I'm going to try to continue working on my silk screen project on weekends or in my free time, so hopefully I'll have more to talk to you about that soon!