Moving Forward

Perhaps the most intimidating words an art director can mutter are "do whatever you want".

Doing whatever you want is pretty much the opposite of what illustration is. Sure there are varying degrees of freedom on any assignment, but usually there is a story or product or service that plays a role in determining, at least to some degree, what the art is going to be.

So I was a little nervous when Darren DiLieto asked me to create some artwork for his site, Hire An Illustrator, and told me I had free reign to do whatever I felt like. Unlike personal work, this was actually going to be seen by people and used. There would be no burying it if it was a total disaster.

At the same time, its also really cool to have someone put their faith in you to create whatever you want, knowing that the results will be good. So the fear subsided and excitement took over.

I picked up my sketchbook and returned to some earlier, half developed ideas that I had on how the future sucked. How we lacked all the wonderful things promised by Popular Mechanics and assorted futurists in the 1950s. The sort of things I had come up with while working on this. The jet pack seemed to be one of those things that never materialized. How nice it would be to fly into Manhattan from Brooklyn without sitting in traffic or waiting for the train like the some 19th Century man. It's 2010 we should have jet packs by now. That thinking inspired the sketch that turned into the image above.

Of course as I finished this up, I saw this. Maybe there's hope for the future after all.