Having a fit

Detail for the right side of the illustration

Among moments I cherish most as an illustrator is permission from a client to experiment.

Here is a project for a publication celebrating the future of electrical use in the western United States.

It focuses on more renewable, efficient production and the ever smarter technology that enables consumers the individual control to buy and use electrical power.

The illustration runs along the bottom of a two-page spread to allow for text above (which is why the rays and shapes along the top bleed and fade), so long and narrow that it doesn't fit big enough to see well in this blog format:

See what I mean? So I chopped into neat pieces to show the details:

The center cut of the illustration. Layers of overlapping colors and repeated ghosting shapes suggest control and interaction.
That's the story I'm sticking with, anyway.

I created a cross-section of the west, from sea to shining eroded butte, coloring the landscape with the rays of power and electricity, suggesting objects by their absence, paring tangibles to their basic shapes.

Left detail of the illustration, complete with a car and charging station that could only have come out of Popular Mechanics c. 1947

I meant the work to be a sunny paean to mid-century wishful futuristic illustrations.

Here are some of the early sketches:

Like all good projects, it ended too quickly.