Worth Magazine Illustrations — Another Milestone
You may know, Dear Reader, that I pioneered The Wall Street Journal ‘Hedcut” portrait style. I was a full-time illustrator at The Journal for eight and a half years. Now I am coming to the end of another publishing association, of which I’m proud.I have steadily drawn Worth Magazine illustrations since 2009 — a run very close to that of my time at WSJ!
That's a lot of Worth Magazine Illustrations
It’s mind-boggling to consider All of the work I penned for this prominent financial magazine! Several major illustrations for each issue. As with The Journal, the folks at Worth and I experimented with the various treatments and formats to find the optimal look we were after.Below, an early image, borrowing stylistically from the WSJ, being a single headshot. Unlike the Journal, we used a circular crop to distinguish our art…
The publisher, Sandow Media, wanted to move away from this hedcut treatment pretty quickly, I believe, for two reasons: They wanted their brand to stand out as being unique, and the people I had to portray immediately evolved into groups of people. These subjects were part of a special section highlighting Financial Advisors. Some of the subjects were individuals, but the majority were groups of people belonging to financial companies.
A sampling of my Worth Magazine illustrations over the years
We will start with a few single portraits, and work up to some multiple-subject portraits. To distinguish ourselves from the WSJ, we used more full-figured cropping…
I enjoyed studying and rendering all those suits! Tedious, perhaps, but pretty effective I think!Moving on, here are two trios:
One of the challenges of drawing Worth Magazine illustrations
Dealing with groupings of subjects presents its own challenges. I spent many photoshop hours correcting the figure-placement in the photos I received! In later years, I became an expert at changing individuals within a group illustration, because a partner was being replaced, added or removed. It was a more and more frequent occurrence as time went on!Larger group portraits…
I’ll miss working for Worth, but will still occasionally appear in its pages going forward.In the meantime, I’m moving on to new and interesting projects. Stay Tuned!