Lose That Ball And Chain And See Monument Valley

An illustration for Successful Meetings Magazine, commissioned by award-winning art director Jennifer Ruf. It was for an article which made a strong case for not boycotting Arizona-based conventions because of the state’s new immigration law.

I used Photoshop to clean up the original line drawing, and a photo of Arizona’s Monument Valley for the background. I retained the photo’s original RGB color mode so I could apply Photoshop’s Artistic Filters (which are not available for CMYK images). The filters smooth the contours of the photo, making it easy to use the Pen Tool to clip out the remaining clouds. I converted the photo to CMYK before pasting it into the illustration, then used a watercolor brush to add some blue sky. Scroll down to see the entire construction sequence.