Building the Perfect Tennis Player (2011)

CLIENT: Cincinnati Enquirer
AGENCY: In-house

The premise for this illustration was a column about what parts of pro tennis players set them apart from their peers, and I took the title literally. Like most of my early illustrations for the Enquirer, the turnaround had to be pretty quick, but I think the short amount of time I had forced me to make a lot of simplicity-based decisions that actually make the drawing work better.

It wasn’t uncommon for me to draw a color version of an illustration for online and then bust it down to black-and-white for print, shown above; I also had to make some quick decisions based on contrast and composition for that. I want to say that this one was on page 2 or 3 of that day’s Sports section. They can’t all be section covers after all, ha ha.