Sleep illustration
Aug 8th, 2008 by J. O'Brien
This is me, still struggling through "Moby Dick." Actually, I’m currently finishing Frank Herbert’s "Dune" and have Paul Bowles’ "The Spider House" on deck (although I would rather read his "Let It Come Down" but can’t find a copy).
I just finished this illustration for Johns Hopkins for a story about a sleep study procedure that can be done in the comfort of your home. The client wanted a "homey" feel with the addition of a graph that represented the procedure. To keep the image more general, I designed it without the graph, just an image about sleep, and then worked in the graph for the client. So this is the non-graph version.
The cat is a combination of my daughter’s two cats, Misty and Lue. Misty likes to sleep in this position next to me; Lue modeled for the ears and paws. And even though I’m moving toward the use of more reference, the figure and the rest of the scene were drawn from memory.