New Accountancy Age Cover

Here is a new illustration for the cover of Accountancy Age, which went to print Tuesday.

I really enjoyed myself with this brief, Dan Parker AD at the mag came to me with this idea of a business fella in a supermarket browsing for Accountants; they would be in boxes and on a sale stand... which I thought was a great concept.

When I started drawing it out it dawned on me early on that my original composition (none of the above) would work as it concentrated on the figure too much, where as for the purpose of telling this visual story, the "For Sale" aisle should be equal if not more important than the figure.

I quickly sketched out three thumbnails for Dan to pick from, that showcased the boxes and aisle better, he chose the third one from the sketches above.

I worked up a black and white rough, and got this over to Dan the next day, once this was approved I moved to final artwork.

I had the weekend to complete the final colour artwork; I went a bit crazy on the detail on the boxes; I must admit it's these little things that I enjoy and sent in on the Monday.

There were quite a few alterations to make, but these were just changes to Accountant names on the boxes so that they didn't infringe or promote the names of real accountants.. it got a bit confusing there for a while, just because any name you can think of is taken by an accountancy firm somewhere, that and I had quite a few different versions of the artwork on my hard drive, so I had to make sure my alterations went on the right file(s)!

At the top is the artwork as it was printed, I've really enjoyed these jobs for the nice fellas at AA; the fact is they know what they want, have a good understanding of what I do and set great briefs...what more could an illustrator ask for?!!