Unpublished Illo. Dept.

This illo. was done for a national newspaper and the story ended up being canceled due to the fact that one of the paper's major competitors did a story almost identical to this one a day or two before this was to see print. It's not the first time something like this has happened so it wasn't to surprising but still it was a bit of a let down.

The story had something to do with hospitals attempting to improve the customer-patient experience and improving it to the equivalent of a 5 star hotel. I got the call from the A.D. on a Friday afternoon and the finish needed to be done by 12:00 the following Monday. I didn't get the chance to read the manuscript because the writer hadn't finished it at that point. The A.D. knew what the gist of the story was so he discussed with me what he and the other editors thought would be an appropriate solution. I quickly did the sketch per our conversation, scanned it and email it to him. He promptly got back to me with an OK and I was good to go.

I worked on the illo. over the course of the weekend, did the the finishing touches Monday morning and sent it off. The A. D. seemed very happy with the end results and said that the publishing date had been bumped to the following week. I contacted him early the next week to check and see which day it'd see print and that's when I received the news of the story being killed. Oh well.