Pen Light Sets Off  Illustration Bomb!

Inside Counsel Magazine asked me to do an illustration for a story about a good-faith clerical error in a lengthy and complex contract that resulted in a 1.67 billion dollar lawsuit. I used Photoshop drawing tools to construct a symmetrical bomb,
then added a hand and coat sleeve, and a fuse for the bomb:

I wanted to light the fuse with a pen that looked like a burning match. I used Photoshop’s Pen tool to extract a fancy gold pen point and an elegant business pen
from these two photos:

I used the Warp tool to make the pen point look like a flickering flame, and applied a Selective Color command to convert the pen from silver to gold:

Lorem Ipsum is a Latin-based dummy text that’s been used by the printing industry since the 1500’s. I used a lorem ipsum generator to create several paragraphs of densely-worded text to convey the sense of a complex legal document:

I took a screen shot of the text, pasted it into the illustration, reduced the opacity,
then added a bluish background to create depth and simulate the look of parchment:

Finally, I used two different gradients (white and yellow) and a brush set to scatter
and fade to create a burning fuse. I added white text to the bomb, then rasterized
the text and used the Warp tool to make it fit inside the bomb. Here’s the final: