Playing at Cards

This is likely going to be a long post, with lots of images. I fully expect this one to chew up all my monthly allowance on uploaded images (because I'm a skinflint and don't pay for space - yet). Remember you can click the images to get a better view, though they still won't be as large as they were drawn. OK, enough waffle, let's get started - I created a card for my Brother's 31st birthday. I created it ages ago, I just couldn't post it until it was in his sweaty little hands.

And that's it! Have a nice day. Oh, no wait, I should probably talk about the process and motivations and stuff right? OK, I shall.

Firstly, the idea for the card came almost a year ago. I was working on a series of pieces based on famous posters in a different style to the original. I did some Jaws ones, got a Star Wars one out of the way, and then my PC died taking the originals with them.
While I was doing them though my Brother suggested doing the Iron Giant in the style of Brian Bolland. I wasn't to taken with it at the time; the Iron Giant's posters were kinda blah, and not particularly iconic (the film was great of course - see it if you haven't), so I forgot about it.


Months go by, and then I see this; the album cover for Queen's News of the World, which of course I'd seen before, but not since the poster idea had come up.  This made it more interesting - how about a picture of the Iron Giant in the style of Brian Bolland referencing the pose and layout of News of the World?
Even better, News of the World's cover was lifted from a famous Astounding Science Fiction cover, making it a double reference.  Awesome right?  But still not awesome enough, but then I figured if I made it similar to those 1950's horror/sci-fi comic books as well we'd have references out the wazoo and it's be worth doing, so I got started.

Pencils:

Bolland works entirely digitally these days, but I wanted to at least rough things out with real pencils. The results are not too bad, except I put the thumb on the wrong side of the giant's hand! This was before I really got into the whole reminding myself how to draw thing clearly...
So I scanned this in, fixed the thumb mistake and sketched in Hogarth. I sketched in Hogarth a LOT, and no, you don't get to see all the failed versions because I neglected to save them, sorry. Here's the final though:

You'll note I also resized the giant's head.  The head changes a few times, but ended up not being to far from this in the end.  Also, Hogarth's face was based ona  Bolland illustration of a kid with a bomb from an old Judge Dredd.  It's not an exact copy, but I aimed to get the same expression of shock in the Bolland style, so it's fairly close.

Ink

Nice and clean yes?  Firstly I blew the image up really large (far larger than I really needed to, but to the resolution BB uses when he does his work), and started tracing over the "pencils" using a combination of free hand and pen tool.
You'll note I made some substantial changes to the Giant as I inked.  In retrospect I should have done this at the penciling stage, but it still worked out OK.  This giant is a lot closer to the one in the film than my original sketch (What with the thumb being int he right place and everything).  After this I started shading and filling in the blacks.

Which I really rather like as is.  Hogarth was shaded freehand, but the larger lines across the giant's body needed a different approach sine my hand isn't steady enough to do consistent shading at that scale in PS.  To combat this I cheated and did only about a dozen lines, which I cloned and rotated to create he cross hatching.  Hey, I'm not Brian Bolland; he could probably do it for real in his sleep.  You'll notice the eyes went back to being round too - I just preferred them that way.  Oh, and the background was a cheat too, using various filters to get the lines for the gradient from black to white (This was actually something I could have done easily by hand, but I was close tot he finish and wanted to just get it done).

Colour

This is probably the least interesting image of this set.  Look, I just grabbed colour samples from screengrabs of the film and used the flood fill tool, with a gradient for the background.  Yawn.  I still like how it looks though.

This is more like it.  I just went over the flat colours using Dodge and Burn, and also the airbrush tool.  Nothing very exciting, but it added a hack of a lot to the finished piece.  Once t was done I grabbed an image of some old paint and some stained paper and overlayed them with a low opacity for texture.  So the main image was now finished, and all I needed to do was create the title card and stick it behind the Giant's head.

This all makes it sound like I did it in a weekend, but I was busy at work while working on it, so it took almost a month.  Half an hour here, half an hour there, an hour or two on occasion.  I have no idea how long the whole thing took, but I'm pleased with the finished work, even though I keep finding fault with it each time I see it again.

Finally, here's a crop from the image at the actual size it was drawn - this is from the Ink stages: