"Dog Hitching"

One of my favorite reoccurring gigs is for the folk at Parks Highway Service & Towing 
(previous posts here, here and here). This year's design was testament to the power of spontaneous inspiration as I had basically spaced the assignment out until the last minute (one of the many reasons I have a great deal of empathy with my Beginning Drawing students, natch).

I had gentle reminder via a query as to whether I'd given it any thought, which was promptly buried under an avalanche of other stuff ("oh yeah - I'll get right on that"), and so when the time came for the "how's that going?" email I set myself up for a rush job by replying I'd have concept roughs done that night. En route to campus I camped out at the cafe with sketchbook in hand, and after a few false starts, this one came out the other end of the pen. So I gave it a quick wash + a few blobs of white-out, scanned it right before class and emailed it off for approval. The students also got to see the condensed process unfold in real-time as they were privy to each step, since I got a thumbs-up and immediately set about improving the panel's composition by penciling it out (including the detail off to the side as posted above) and then inking it in all in one sitting.  Not my normal MO but on-the-spot deadlines sometimes make for good focus under pressure as a creative catalyst.

After scanning the line art as a precautionary backup I took it home for a watercolor session, and that variation worked out better than expected, so the final piece got rescanned the next morning, and away it went. The print version in the newspaper that ran as a Nuggets was a wee bit small + muddy  - still looking awesome though - so it was a nice contrast to see it appear in a different context and sharp, crisp color (hat-tip Graphic North).