Wanderers in the 4th Dimension

You may, by this point, be of the opinion that I rather like Doctor Who. You would be wrong. I frickin' love Doctor Who. Or rather I don't. What I do is enjoy Doctor Who as it airs on TV, to varying degrees depending on who the writer or director of the current episode is. What I love is what Doctor Who represents. What he represents, much like Sherlock Holmes and James Bond and The Bash Street Kids and (the British) Dennis the Menace is a Britain that doesn't exist, but which everyone really wishes did, and the show has represented that wondrous escapism for 47 years.

You could, potentially, have come up with the concept in the US I suppose, but the chances are that the studio execs, even back in 1963, would insist on the hero being younger and more likable, bug eyed monsters from the start and the Time Machine being something cool. (As Doc Brown once said, "If you're going to build a Time Machine into a car, may as well do it with some style").  As it happened the Doctor did become younger and more likable over time, the bug eyed monsters showed up in the second serial and have never really left, and the time machine became just about the coolest device on the screen simply because of what it is and represents (at least until a certain smuggler came along in a fabulous flying hamburger).

What is it about Time Machines?  If you know Doctor Who and you see a British Police box the first thing that will likely come to mind is "TARDIS", and likewise on seeing a Delorian the words "Flux-Capacitor" inevitably come floating across the fore-brain (I suppose if you're a bit more of a staid and serious type with a good memory the first words might be "Drug Trafficking").  In both cases the object is the time machine in the general consciousness.  I wonder if my grandchildren will think of Time Travel when they see hot tubs...  But I digress.

This is the 1st Doctor, played by the late William Hartnell.  You may be wondering why I didn't do it as a caricature this time, but in fact it is a caricature; just a much more subtle one than the other Doctors so far.  Hartnell had a face so rich with character to begin with that I didn't want to push it much further.  I think the results are quite nice (you can click it for the full size version), and I'm fairly pleased with the progress of my portraits so far.   If you know Hartnell's Doctor I don't think there would be any difficulty in recognizing this image as being him.  Obviously if you are less familiar with the actor/character combination you won't have a clue, but hopefully you think it's still a cool picture of an old man with piercing eyes. Funny really, because while Hartnell certainly had eyes just as piercing as these, the photo the image is based on didn't really show them as such.

This was the fairly dreadful start to the piece, and at this point I was going to push the caricature further than I ended up doing.  Rather than start over I drew over the top of this existing piece since most of the guides were already in place.

You may note that his eyes are looking to his right in this sketch, which is because they were in the original photograph (Which it now occurs to me you may want to see - so it's here).  Nothing much else to add.  You can see that there's more to the sketch below the neck than finally ended up in the picture - This is because I cropped it later on, I did a larger image right up until the last stage, but we'll get to that in a minute, have some patience already.

The photograph I was working from was in Black and White, so here's me working out a rough colour palette based on a completely different colour photo or Mr. Hartnell.  This would bite me mildly in the behind later on as the colour photograph was on set, in 1963.  Why is that significant?  Think about it, see if you can work it out before I tell you.  I took more stage by stage grabs than usual this time, so scroll down a bit for more text.

 

 

At this point I've got everything done except the blending on the jacket and some work on his hair. The background could do with some love too, but the background too a few goes to get the feel I wanted for it.

Other than the background are you seeing a difference between these two images? The first one has his face being very saturated with colour and not particularly natural. Why? Well, you remember I based the colours on an old set photo? Well, in 1963 they pretty much hid any natural skin tones under fairly thick makeup which the black and white cameras of the time picked up better. As a result I have a picture that is probably accurate to how he looked on set, but much less accurate to how he would have looked in reality. I couldn't find a more natural photograph of him, so I used some artistic license and guessed. First I desaturated his skin tones somewhat (I don't think you could do this easily in real media, but digitally it's A doddle of course). After that I painted over portions of his face with various light watercolour washes to make his tone less flat and more natural looking.

Years ago I worked out that the best way to do this (I think. I'm no expert and I've never been taught properly) is to use a little yellow in areas with thick skin or fat deposits (forehead/chin), red where there are many blood vessels (Nose, cheeks, ears) and blue or green where there would be hair or stubble (lower cheeks, also the chin). In the case of a man anyway, on a woman things are slightly different - there's no stubble, and you don't want to draw attention to fatty tissue.  I didn't add much int he way of Blue/green tot he image as Hartnell always looks freshly shaved and was grey by this time anyway.

Finally I cropped the image, entirely by happy accident. I pulled the portrait into the one of the 9th Doctor, intending to rescale it to match the proportions of the previous ones, but the result without scaling looked so good I just left it. I wish I'd thought of it sooner, it would have saved a lot of work on the background...

No more Doctor Who for a bit - I have some other things to catch up on, but I'm sure I'll get back to doing more sooner or later.