Welcome Harrison Part 2: Mum

So I was fairly early on in the creation of the card from the last post when it dawned on me that I was going to need to d a second one; this time for Rachel, Stu's fiancée and the (then) expectant mother.  I didn't mind this at all, despite having only met Rach a handful of times I think she's great, and only wish I could spend more time seeing the both of them (a distance of 4,000 miles and an ocean between us makes that difficult, and more than a little expensive).  The problem is that while I like Rachel, I don't really know her, not in the way I know Stu, so I had no idea what to do for her card.  What I eventually came up with, and how I arrived at it, you can see after the break.

There we are, a good old fashioned Italian horror movie poster, with Rachel as both heroine and villain (or maybe the vampire is a good one... Maybe they're supposed to be the same person, or twins... Twins, one of whom is a vampire, and the other a recent mother, yeah, that sounds like a 60's horror flick all right. Anyway, I don't know, I'll have to rent the film and find out).

So how I arrived at this is almost as interesting as how I arrived at Stu's (So if you thought that was boring you know it's time to get out now). My first thought was to do her as a superhero, in the mold of Adam Hughes or Alex Ross. Maybe Wonder Woman, hovering over the viewer with a Lasso in one hand and a baby carrier in the other. Not exactly basass, but pretty cool. Eventually I figured the sensible thing to do would be to ask Stu, but without letting on anything about the existence of his card. So that's what I did.

"A 50's pinup, or some nosecone art from a plane, or a B-Movie poster, but she's not the shrieking damsel, she's the protagonist, or looks tough as nails on the plane or something." I'm paraphrasing of course, this is condensed from about 20 minutes of conversation. So I had a rough idea of the direction to go in and started sketching.

None of these look remotely like Rachel, they're just quick doodles to find a concept.  By now you know that the one I went with was the one in the middle, the surrounding ones were sounding out my ideas, and if you go anti-clockwise  from top left, and ignore the final, you can see the evolution of my thoughts I guess.  Anyway, I realised by the time I reached top right that the posed were as dull as dung, and tried hard to make the next one as dynamic as possible.  Jackpot!  Meanwhile Stu had sent me a handful of photos of Rachel (The only ones I had she was grinning like a loon), which meant I could get a reasonable likeness going.  That led to these:

  

The left most one is obviously the previous image mixed with one of the other sketches and stretched a bit; it looks okay in the sketchbook - I think my scanner distorts things slightly depending on their location on the scanning plane, or the sketchbook; regardless I didn't want her looking so squat.  The right hand image was just drawn over the top.  Unlike the previous card there was very little tracing here - just the big face in the background, though obviously I referred to a lot of photographs to get the foreground figures right, and changed her face in the background a bit to give her more of a leer instead of a big happy smile.  If you lay one over the other you'll see the figures are close to identical, except one is holding a baby.  Now I'm going to try doing something I've not done before - hopefully this works:

Hey, look at that, 2 weeks work condensed into 7 seconds.  Nice.

So, you can see from that that I changed the rotation of the sword to make it a little more subtle, and I added trees and such to the picture to improve the composition.  I have to 'fess up about those trees - while I was researching I stumbled across a French poster for The Curse of the Werewolf (The Hammer one) which had a similar composition to the one I planned, it even had a similar green background and the moon in about the same place (I'd already started mine when I found it, but maybe I'd seen it before and it influenced me subconsciously).  Well, that poster had all these twisty trees on it, and when I was almost done with this poster I realized it was lacking something, so I more or less nicked the trees on the left of The Curse of the Werewolf poster wholesale.  Yeah, yeah, whatever, I was in a rush.

Why was I in a rush?  Because baby Harrison decided he'd had enough in the dark and the wet and wanted to come out early.  Two weeks early.  I shouldn't be surprised, my own son came early, but even so the card wasn't in any position to be sent.  You see in that animated gif the point where her belt appears?  That's where I was at when Rachel went into labor.  Now admittedly it was a fairly long labor, but it still meant I had to get the card finished pronto. So I pulled my thumb out of my backside and went for it, hence the stolen trees.  I also didn't relight her face from the reference for the background face (Which I had planned to do, and had to do for her foreground visage), so that made painting that and keeping a likeness much, much easier.  Oh, and the bat got moved around a bit as you can see.  Most of the painting was done in Artrage, with the final grime and colour pass done in Photoshop, as well as compositing the titles (which were painted separately from the main image in ArtRage).

So there you have it, two cards done for the wonderful new parents.  I shall leave you with the "actual size" crop of the image while I go off and plan the card for their wedding (kidding... maybe).