Houston's best!

Last month I worked on a great project for Houston Press; it was great to work with them again after a very long time (they were one of first freelance clients waaaaaaay back in 2008!) This assignment was a blast as they wanted to go with a gambling theme for their annual "Best of" issue, and they wanted full-page section images of playing-card royalty living it up!

After some discussion about how to keep a consistency and overall theme within the four images, I sent over these roughs from which the AD picked her favorites:

I have to admit I was a little bummed the cucumber-eyed queen and b-ball dribbling jack weren't selected, but I was still super happy to be drawing any of these! Refined Sketches:

And here are the final images; it was requested that they all be in monochromatic palettes, but upon seeing these versions, the AD was swayed into the dual-color variations. I had also planned to work with line from the get -go as a way to allude to playing card artwork as well as to handle the complexity of the images. The boxes at the bottoms were for the section tittles (placed by the AD)

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Thanks for reading!

Enjoy the Day,

Chris