This was a self-promotional piece done as Mubarak was being overthrown.

The idea was to show how popular uprisings, not necessarily military actions, were starting to topple dictators in the middle east.  And how this would result in a domino effect in other places.

At this point I’d already drawn and had a cartoon published in the online foreign affairs magazine Current Intelligence.

Here’s the initial sketch:

First colors.

The colors I selected were Green, Red and Black.  In countries in the middle east green can represent new life, red can represent victory, white; purity.   Using this palette could be tricky because, to western eyes, these colors could have completely different meanings.

Below is my analysis of the movement in the drawing:

As you can see, I added some people at the bottom to represent the popular source of the uprising.  The arrows represent the movement I could see in the drawing, and it wasn’t turning out very dynamic.  The dudes were also looking a bit angry and the dimensions called for in the layout would have made their expressions and features unreadable.  Their style was also not matching the rest of the illustration.

On to the next iteration:

I replaced the figures with arms and now you can see how the lines of movement are more dynamic.

I made the arms a little smaller and worked them into the background.

Here is the final illustration in a sample layout.