Creation of a page from the mad doodlings of a sports writer to the finish page

As a graphic artist my main job is to come up with and design layouts and illustrations from scratch. But sometimes I get my ideas from reporters I work with. My most recent page design is the York Revolutions playoffs layout. I received a preliminary sketch from Jim who is a sports writer.

Here's the sketch

So this gives me a basic idea where the writer is going with his idea. I then start building my package based on his sketch. The idea was to layout the players on the page in their playing position on the field. I drew a baseball field in Adobe Illustrator and brought in images of the players and positioned them on the field.

Here's a sneak peak of the final page, to see the enitire finish page check out tomorrow's sports section in the York Daily Record/Sunday News.