Illustration - The Preying Mantis (Part 3)

Here are some scans of the final versions of my feature and spot illustrations for The Preying Mantis short story by Deborah Joy Corey.  For those of you who might have missed out, the story is about a single woman who works at a diner attached to a gas station in the middle of nowhere.  She runs the show by herself there, but she is also really unattractive and has a habit of punishing the people who call her names or talk bad about her, by putting bugs that she collects in their food.  

Final Color Version:

For this I actually collaged on the figure to give it a little more pop and dimension.  I kept my color palette very simple using a .005 Micron pen, black india ink, white india ink and Winsor Newton water colors.

Final Black and White Spot:

Final Color Spot:

When I was thinking about the placement of the spot illustration (at the end of the story) I thought about how I’ve set the story with the illustration at the beginning, and then the story has been told.  The last picture, in my mind, should be the closing shot cinematically speaking.  So I had to visualize where “in the middle of nowhere” really was.  When I was thinking of gas stations that have diners attached to them, I recalled the Route 66 style stations that were a combination of things for the weary travelers who might have been on the road all day.  So I had to do a bit of research on signs from that area and what the stations looked like.  In the end, I decided to create my own classic style sign (based it off of the small one I made in the last version of my spot) for Hinky Dinky (where she works), but keep it simple because the illustration is only 3.5 inches wide by 2.25 inches tall.

As an update, I wasn’t able to finish my GD1 project about Stephen Colbert with enough time to photograph it and post it here.  When I get it back I will, and I’ll post some images from the PDF of the pages too.  Till next time.