Sketches: Blondie Goes To Hollywood

I'm not paid nearly enough for some of the work I do. Believe me, this isn't a display of hubris — it's an objective assessment! (This is a small publisher.) So it's in my best interests to limit the time I invest in these projects to a minimum. That said, though, I don't mind putting a bit more effort into the covers, where the work will show.

And so it was I came to spend most of the day working on this (which took more time than I had to spare).

Since this is a book about a long-running comic strip (sort of), that seemed like a good direction to go. I did a sketch to work out the basic idea, a page of comics, but that seemed a bit — dull. So I tilted it a bit, just to give it some tension and energy. I was concerned about straying too far from what would still be recognizable as a comics page, but I thought I could get away with it, given the subject of the book.

I've used primary colors — actually, process colors — to bring to mind the appearance of a comic strip. All I had to work with were photographs (I'm precluded from using any art from the comic strip) and only black-and-white photographs at that, so I've tinted them. I couldn't use the actual logo, either, so I put one together that is, shall we say, a reasonable facsimile.