Finished cover and next project

The cover for "Creative Loafing: Atlanta" is pretty much complete. I always look forward to seeing how the designer incorporates the typography. Now onto my initial conceptual sketches for the cover of a Philadelphia paper.
I think architecture is the main focus of this mag. A lot of times when you are given an assignment the art director has a pretty definite idea of what they want conveyed in the piece. I didn't get much direction other than to produce a gritty Philadelphia street scene. My mind became flooded with ideas and I had a hard time focusing my thoughts. The above sketch has was my first thumbnail which took me about 10 minutes to put together. I was thinking about just showing a closeup of a multi-cultural Philly crowd. The art director thought it would be a good idea to pull the "camera" back to reveal more of the buildings which makes sense. I just have a more fun time drawing people than architecture, but since its a commercial gig I am at his mercy and happy to oblige and came up with the sketch below...
Since he wanted me to simply pull the camera back I assumed that he was happy with the section of Philadelphia that I chose to draw and I decided to work out the perspective on a smaller piece of paper and then sketch in some simple ideas that I had for the crowd scene. I stressed that this would not be the final composition of the characters in the piece. The pencilled version of this art is coming along nicely. More on that later.