Welcome Harrison Part 1: Dad

So my best friend now has a Son, born last Tuesday morning.  this is a big deal in my book, and since I knew he was coming I figured I should do a card.  Well, that's a lie; the realization that I needed to do a card came to me shockingly late, and via one of those random things that like to just happen, but a card was the result.  You'll get the full story on the card below the break, right after a look at the artwork for the card itself.

No, your eyes are not deceiving you, I have drawn my best friend dressed as Indiana Jones punching out a Raptor to protect his little tyke. This is about the most badass thing I could think of, except I didn't really think of it so much as came upon the idea by accident. It all began with this:

Which was just a doodle I did along with a bunch of other figure work a while back (sometime in early July I guess).  Even this wasn't just a case of "Hey, I'll draw a guy with a baby punching a dinosaur!"  But more like I drew a head, then a body and arm to go with it, that seemed to be punching, then a Dino to be punched, and finally a little baby bundle to make the guy even more hardcore.  Such is the nature of doodles, they just sort of go where they want.  Anyway, then I forgot about it for a few days.

When I remembered the image again it just seemed obvious that I should make the guy with the baby Stu (My best mate), and from there it clearly needed to be a card.  But how to proceed? How to amp the geek awesome meter up yet another notch?

In retrospect how to do that is obvious of course, you dress the guy like Indiana Jones and draw it in the style of Drew Struzan (You know Drew's work even if you don't know his name - He did movie posters, like the ones for the Back to the Future films, and half the Indy posters ever done).  You'll note I said draw; this is because there's not a cat in hell's chance of my painting like Drew Struzan, even digitally, but I figured I could do something along the lines of his preparatory sketches.  This took me almost a month to conclude - like I say, it's obvious in retrospect.

I had to test that to see if I was right about being able to do a rough facsimile of Mr. Struzan's work, so I knocked up the following:

Its traced of course, if only to save time (Tracing isn't as cut and dried as you'd think, but I'll save that discussion for another day), and I drew it fairly small since it's only a test, but I felt confident enough after this to continue.  Much reference collection followed, and I discovered I only had one photo of Stu that was even close to being useful for the end result.  I also decided to change the composition from that of my initial doodle to something a bit more in your face, which I then worked out on the fly rather than doing some more prep sketches (This is a really stupid thing to do by the way, but it worked out okay in this case).

The first thing to do was rough out the layout:

Parts of which were also traced, partly to save time, but partly because I didn't want to bugger it up (if you're wondering, Drew Struzan also often traces much of his preparatory work - Movie posters are big business, you need to get them right without wasting time).  So what was traced?  The hand (it's mine), the hat, the rough layout of Stu's face (not an exact trace, since he didn't have the expression I was needing in the photo I had) and the dinosaur (My friend Todd would be disgusted with me; he's a paleo-illustrator) .  That was the extent of the tracing. though much of the rest was copied from photo sources.  The shading and such from here on was all done from reference, but with no additional tracing.

Here's the image at about the halfway mark:

You'll note the dinosaur got pulled in a bit for the final composition, and the "paper" got a bit lighter.  The Raptor was on a separate layer, making moving him easy.  I think I had 4 layers total - Stu/baby, the hand, the dinosaur and the background.  Oh, and the splats!  They had a layer too...  It took a while to figure out how to do them.

Loose paint splats are a hallmark of the Struzan look -  do an image search on his name and you'll soon find an illustration in this style, and the paint splats are usually present.  Problem is, paintsplats are a very organic thing, and I was doing this digitally.  Art Rage (Which this was drawn in) doesn't have a Paint Splat tool, but it does have a sticker spray, which you can setup with your own images as the stickers.  So, it made sense to set the paint spatter up as a series of stickers.  It needed to be a fair number of splotches though; too few would still look really fake.  So I looked up paint splatter in an image search and ended up with a really big image with lots of splotches all over it - from that I could derive my sticker sheet, as follows:

From this it was fairly easy (if a little time consuming) to set up the Sticker Spray tool and spray over logical parts of the image to get the desired random result.

And thats it. From the Indy test sketch tot he finished work took about 4 days.  Not sure how much time I put in each day but I'd guess the total time to be in the region of 8 or 10 hours, not bad all things considered.

A few days after I finished the piece he told me the name they had picked out - Harrison.  Serendipity right  there yes?  Anyway, they received the cards (The next post will be the Hers to this one's His) and seemed quite taken with them, so I think the work was worth it.  Am I 100% happy with the result?  Nope, but it's a hell of a lot better than I could have produced when I first started this blog don't you think?

Oh, and as will rapidly become tradition, I'll leave you with a section of the artwork at 100% scale:

I guess the early day tomorrow is going to beat me after all (this post took longer than planned), I'll write up the background on his Fiancées card tomorrow.