Finger Snapping Sketch

Click for larger image - don't get your hopes up, though. It's
not going to be like The Da Vinci code where you see, like, secret
clues in the artwork.

This is a weird one. A few years ago, I got a call from someone who identified himself as an agent representing a celebrity. But he wasn't that person's agent in the traditional sense; he was only representing them in working to get a book published. However, he wasn't working with the publisher or any literary agent - he was just hired as what I would call a project manager, helping to put a book together. Like I said - weird.

It took a couple phone calls and e-mails to get the name of the celebrity out of him (I didn't beg) - I won't post the name here, but this person has a very specialized skill set. You can probably figure it out - you're smart. The book was to be a kind of fake biography of this person's life, and how they affected history with their special skill of finger snapping. Think Forrest Gump, but less heartwarming and without that rarely-quoted line about the chocolates.

The agent liked my work (hopefully he wouldn't have called me if he didn't - that would be mean) but asked politely if I'd "audition" for the book, and do one sample sketch. Like most illustrators, I'm generally against that kind of spec work, but (this is how I justified it) they seemed to be down to two or three potential illustrators, and it felt like a fairly reasonable request - they only wanted to see a sketch, not a finished inked and colored illustration. And, there was a semi-high profile project at the end; a full book with many illustrations - it would have been pretty fun, too. I gave in and did the sketch above, based on one of the concepts provided to me (a child version of the book's subject, as a Boy Scout, starting a fire by snapping his fingers - if you couldn't get that from the drawing).

This is what a portion of the image looks like when blown up a bit.

I submitted the piece and I think I actually wound up calling the agent a week later. He said his celebrity liked my work but was still deciding on which illustrator he was going to use. And that's it - I never heard back after that. Pretty anticlimactic. I'd almost forgotten about the whole project (understandably) since it never made it to a complete illustration, and therefore I don't use it on any of my sites. So you, blog readers, are seeing something very rare. And hey, if another project comes along that covers this same subject - finger snapping Boy Scouts - I'm going to be well ahead of the game.