I got my first job for Fortune's “While you were out…” column by Stanley Bing in the beginning of 2001.

A talented creative director and a world-famous outdoor chef Blake Taylor, now at Inc. Magazine, asked me to do something for a column they run, where an elusive businessman known under the alias of Bing wrote about the good old times and the brand new worlds of business. Tim Smith was (and remained) the editor and Bing, of course, the writer.

I looked for a style that would resonate with Bing’s dark humor which, underneath the surface lightness, often dealt with serious and even somber sides of the executive world. I decided to use the style itself as a commentary. The polished, stock-photo-style collages became my medium for transferring a much darker picture. Luckily, the guys at Fortune got the pun.

Over the years we went through surpluses and recessions, downsizings and political correctness crazes, 9.11s and Enrons, through new customs and old habits which die hard. The turnover was quick as we tried to be up-to-date with topics. Every two weeks I would get a short e-mail sounding like, “Bing will write about…” and then have a few hours to churn out the sketches and another day or, if I'm lucky, a whole weekend, to deliver the final. Tim was a great help, one of the editors that would always chose my favorite sketch (can you say anything nicer about an editor?) As my life turned upside down several times, from having a lovely baby girl to my book, Night at the Museum becoming a world-wide movie hit, the good old Bing was always a fixture.
Is this a Bing week, I would wonder times and again.

Some of the illustrations I did on a Mediterranean veranda under the ripe grapes, many more in my New York studio and a few in places as far away as India (for which trip I even got a satellite phone to keep up) and Japan. As I look at older ones they are a diary of my life. I still remember the oyster breakfast I had to have in order to get the empty shells for my illustration. Illustrator’s life can be hard!

And, once the Fortune magazine was out, my illustration and Bing's text, the children of ultimate procrastinators (who never missed their deadline, may I add), would finally be together. I could read the article that I blindly illustrated and grief about the things I could have done differently in my illustration. Still, thanks to Tim's instinct, the ideas were mostly on the spot and Bing's fine writing would often make me laugh out loud.

Over the years I collaborated with several art directors that worked on the column, Tony Mikolajczyk and Vito Zarkovic to name just a few, and enjoyed their artistic input and comments that often made my illustrations better than they started out to be.  

And did I tell you that Bing's real name was…