Moments of Inspiration

Pop art
Illustrator Michael Gibbs likes taking ideas and turning them into images. Just don't ask him where his ideas originate. He's not really sure. "They just pop into my head," says Gibbs, who illustrated "Clock Wise," Melissa Hendricks' story about research on the circadian clock. To make an illustration, he starts off with the concept, does an acrylic painting, scans it, then digitally manipulates that image until he gets the image he had envisioned. "I don't like the look of most purely digital art," says Gibbs, whose work has appeared in Newsweek, Time, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Gibbs lives in Clifton, Virginia, with his wife and two children.

When first things last
To illustrate "Necessary Steps," our cover story on gender equity, Jon Krause wanted to convey inequity in a manner that was smart and subtle. The words "vision" and "balance" were very much on his mind. "Eyes and a scale were literally the first thing that came into my head," says Krause, who paints in acrylics on wood for his illustrations. "They just ended up working." Krause's work has appeared in Time, BusinessWeek, The Atlantic Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He lives in Philadelphia with his beagle, Pickles. — MB

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