Westword illustration process

Back in July of last year, I worked on a cover illustration for Colorado weekly, Westword. The cover story was about oil and gas drilling in Pawnee grasslands and how that was affecting the local bird population. Here was my initial sketches, the one on the right based on the art director's direction and the one on the left just as an option.....

The art director liked the one on the right and suggested a few changes (enlarging the bird, changing the wire to an oil pipe) leading to this tighter sketch using non-photo blue and indigo blue Berol Prismacolor Verithins......

and then once that was approved I whipped up a color comp with Prismacolor markers.....

As for the final piece I kind of wavered between wanting to do it as a traditional painting or work on it in the computer....as much as I wanted to paint it by hand because of a time crunch I thought it would be safer to go the computer route because it would be easier to adjust colors and elements if need be...there's little trick I try to do that add a little "humanity" to my computer created pieces like texture layers (scratches, debris, watercolor stain overlays) that I can tweak to make them more or less noticeable..... Here's the final computer colored piece and how it looked on the final cover.....not my usual subject matter, but I had a blast working on it....