Just for fun. This is essentially fan art of my favorite manga and anime character Astro Boy, but I also wanted to revisit an illustration technique I used for a freelance piece I did earlier in my career. During the late 1980s and early 90s, my good friend Bryan frequently commissioned me to do section front illustrations for a variety of newspaper features as he ascended the editorial ranks within the Knight Ridder news publishing empire. One of my favorite pieces from that time accompanied a story about the rising trend of video game-obsessed kids and the tensions it sometimes led to on the home front.

As is often the case with freelance news assignments the turnaround was short, but after discussing it with Bry, I soon had a clear concept in mind, and was able to crank it out in about a day. Stylistically I wanted to combine crisp-edged shading with subtle gradients and symmetry, and to make it obvious that the subject was manically entranced by whatever game he was playing. I also used a novel (for me at the time) technique of drawing the background spacecraft in a 3D program first to nail down the perspective, and used the resulting 3D renders as templates to redraw in vectors. Looking back 37 years later, the piece still feels like a reflection of something I might draw today, and gives off nostalgic vibes recalling a fun and frantic time when I freelanced illustrations here and there as a side gig in my youth.

For this new Astro Boy piece, I carried forward the symmetry and crisp edge/ gradient combination of the original, and worked in a similar color scheme. I based the composition on a desktop wallpaper photo of an actual figure I found online, and I strived to keep the vectors to a minimum with a handful of well-chosen paths and fills. I spent most of my time tweaking and shading, so the overall result would look intentional and refined. This was a joy to draw, and I loved reflecting on its “spiritual cousin” from my early career. Obviously I have more time to sweat the details on the execution side these days, but I’m satisfied in hindsight with how I expressed the concept and quickly turned around the OG graphic under tight constraints.