Some of us doodle while our pastors preach on Sunday. Illustrator John Hendrix’s sermon drawings turned into a whole feature in CT magazine years ago. Hendrix’s work has continued to appear in CT, including on the cover of our July/August issue on artificial intelligence.
Hendrix shares his inspiration: My images begin with drawing (read: doodles). After many incomprehensible scribbles, I settled on five concepts that I was really interested in drawing—the key to any illustration is to make sure that the concepts you submit to the art directors are actually images you would like to make!
The concept we ended up using for the cover was a version of the old idiom “building the plane while flying it.” It was great fun to take this rather tired phrase and turn it into a visual puzzle where the plane was somehow self-assembling while the passenger was almost totally unaware.
What started as a great thumbnail idea became very challenging once I realized I would have to build all these machines and robotic parts for this plane. I got some visual references to help. The plane itself is a modified Spitfire (I love drawing those planes), and I found some auto-assembly robot parts for some of the various automatic arms.
Once I make the final sketch, then I draw the original art with pen on paper. I color them with a combination of fluid acrylics (which work like watercolor), and I finish them with digital coloring in Adobe Photoshop.
