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More Bugs! Scientific American....

JUNE 1, 2015
 Seems like I've been drawing bugs all month. Not really complaining, I loved these projects... This one was for Scientific American. An article about "Scientists dengue-proofing mosquitos with the help of a pervasive, natural bacterium that can be passed on from one generation to the next. ".

I did the normal dozen thumbanils. The concept kind of went back to one someone had mentioned in a meeting before it even came to me. Jason threw it out casually. So I always include those options. The plugged up nozzle of the mosquito seemed to be the fastest way to get the idea across so we stuck with it. At first I had thought about a more graphic simple color palette but when it came down to painting it,  just felt like it needed more detail.
I loved the idea of putting the mosquito in human clothes... Maybe some nod to blood sucking vampires... but ultimately we decided to blow him up huge. The size would hint at the scale of the problem with dengue. Jason picked number 24 or 26 but since the story was light on copy, wanted to push it to be a spread for more impact. So I did a few sketches of the new layout as a spread.


 They picked "b", so one more tighter sketch before painting. I painted the packground and bug separate because I was really not sure where this was going. When I got into painting it just felt like it needed more detail... We liked "b" because he felt like a huge beast.. I loved seeing him hunched over sort of sulking...


  Above a quick color sketch....My original idea was to do something simple color palette flooding the background red but after I finished the painting it seened such a shame to loose all of that great detail so I changed direction.


 Actually liked the tight cropping, seemed like the size of the bug would get even more exaggerated. And not sure at this point where Jason ended up cropping the image. The only change was a comment about the cork not reading quick enough... An easy fix... Can't wait to see this one in the magazine... Going to make such an impact.
Much thanks to Jason Mishka for letting me work on this with him... So much fun.

Simple design but so eligant... Great gobs of fun working on this little blood sucker....
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