Illustrations of Couples, Part 1

This time, we take a look at several portrait illustrations of couples I’ve drawn. Going back to my time at The Wall Street Journal, we were assigned full-column couple portraits regularly. Here are a few of them…

Composer Wagner and Conductor Chereau

In order to achieve this ‘looking at you’ effect, I had to position the two images with great care so their eyes would meet. This is a scan from an actual WSJ photostat — the kind we would send out to the printing plants. We’d purposely under-expose our ‘stats’ to get the bleed we wanted. Full Saturation!

A Happy Couple

The Journal ran a series profiling couples with disabilities. This image is from that series.

Lois Koray and Allen Kay

Pictured above, the heads of an Ad Agency, Koray/Kay Advertising. It was always a trick finding the right way to join two separate images into a couples illustration. It wasn’t hard to blend the two into a convincing composition.

Moving on to a later gig, at The New Yorker magazine, here is an image from the 1936 Japanese film, “Osaka Elegy”. This drawing is from the 1990’s…

Osaka Elegy

There is deft handling in the line work I achieved in this drawing. I worked for The New Yorker for a couple of years on an almost weekly basis, until they changed their design concept for the Goings On About Town section. It was a fun, yet challenging job while it lasted. Typically, I would have one day to turn around a drawing.

The Connelly’s

More recently, I’ve been commissioned to draw portraits of couples for gifts and occasions. I enjoy representing the expression of love between two people in these images. Below, a couples portrait I created last June…

“Summertime in S.B.”

I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief survey of my Couples Portraits. Stay tuned for more in Illustrations of Couples, Part 2.