Last year, Every Day With Rachael Ray magazine asked Serious Eats (website I do the
Hot Dog Of The Week illustrations for) to do a basketball-bracket style "best hot dog in the country" article and I was lucky enough to be a part of it.
While Serious Eats head honchos Ed Levine and Adam Kuban were in Arizona, Chicago, New York and the West Coast I was driving across the South hitting 5, 6, 7 hot dog joints a day. Along with eating and writing I also did a bunch of illustrations for the article, just published in this month's magazine.
You can check out the bracket
here or grab the magazine but I wanted to post the full size paintings and bunch of stuff that they didn't use.
These quick napkin sketches (I did about 30 of them) were going to be photographed with some actual hot dogs but they ended up not being used.
Also not used was a bunch of lettering for the different sections of the article, a lot of which was fashioned after the awesome hand-painted signs at Angelo's Coney Island in Flint, Michigan. Check out my
recent post on Angelo's for more photos.
Also some spot illustrations of "hot dog drink pairings" like Cheerwine with
Pulliam's Slaw Dog and Moxie with a
Flo's dog.
Much thanks to Serious Eats and everyone at Rachael Ray magazine. It was incredible to illustrate a story I had actually experienced and something I'd love to do again, whether it be hot dogs or something else entirely.
