This was a vey short illustrated article I did a few years back for a magazine called "Pirate Tales". It was published by Black Swan comics and along with doing this article  Smudge compiled the whole magazine for the publisher Richard Becker. This article appeared in the second issue.

Now ships and boats are not an area I have great expertise in. At least not as much as I do in say aircraft, automobiles, or firearms. Therefore I was very honored Mr. Becker asked me to do some work for his magazine because he thought I did excellent ship illustrations! He also wanted me to do illustrations of vessels often used by pirates that were not the usually Pirates of the Caribbean flavor. Since he was doing an issue that had couple other articles about Chinese Pirates I decided to do the Junk for my part of the magazine.

Now the term Junk is very generic and there are literally dozens of different types of Junks. What was more frustrating was that Richard hoping I'd do some nice detail study sketches for the article but all the reference I had in my library covered only the most basic details. To make matters worse the local public and college libraries were not much better. Finally by searching for Sampans did I find a book that also covered Junks as well. Unfortunately it was a Reference Section book and could not be checked out! Therefore I had to do all my preliminary study sketches, note taking, and measurements at the library itself. This slowed the process up a bit because I kept getting interrupted by other people at the library asking questions about what I was doing and what it was for. Once I had my study sketches I did the final illustrations on bristol board using primarily a mechanical pencil.