Fantastic!

If I were smart (and at this point we may as well all agree that I'm not) I would be doing something constructive right now.  I could do some gesture drawing, or figure drawing, or practice drawing the head, or sketch out another Doctor caricature or do a sketch of Wolverine, or just draw/paint something else that takes my fancy.  This would be a good time to do it because my wife has taken my Son to the store to buy paint for the table she's building (She has her own blog if you're interested).  Since we have now established that I am not smart you shouldn't be surprised that I'm writing a blog post instead.   OK, after all that I've practically forgotten what I was blogging about to begin with...  Oh, yes, another picture of the Doctor!

I didn't mean to start on a whole series of caricatures of The Doctor back when I did the first, but they have such great faces. Each and every one of them has a really interesting face, which I guess is required if you want to play the Doctor.

This one (for the uninformed) is Christopher Eccleston who played the Doctor for 13 episodes back in 2005. It wasn't enough, he was really rather good at it, and we'd just got a handle on his caricaturisation when he went and turned into David Tennant (It's a Doctor Who thing). If you don't know your Doctors you might also know Mr. Eccleston from Cracker (With Hagrid!) or a brief appearance on Heros as the Invisible Man, back when Heros did not suck.

Anyway, enough about him, and more about me (ME! ME! M-!). Well, about this thing I drew anyway.

Third verse, same as the first. Sketched it, painted it, blended it, posted it, the end. Okay, you want a step by step illustrated guide, I know. Oh, you don't? Well, too bad because you're getting one.

There's the original sketch.  Mostly this is of note because it looks more like Barrack Obama than it does Chris Eccleston, but it all worked out well in the end. Major changes to this sketch before I was done were the adjustment to the line of his cheekbones and the reduction in size of his ears.  Somewhere along the line I also moved his Adam's Apple to the left, but I have no recollection as to why since it looked perfectly fine where it was.

This is a fun one, and interesting (possibly) because it shows a lot about the process. Notice how rough the paint looks at this point?  That's because at this stage I just slap it on and hope for the best when I blend it later.  You can also see that I do the face first with nothing else around it (Though the neck has a base coat).  Once I'm done witht he head and neck I usually add the clothes on a separate layer to minimise the paints of the contrasting colours getting smudged (In the real world you'd wait for the paint to dry, in Artrage you just add a layer.

And here's that in action.  You can see the face is now much smoother, more or less the final result, but the jacket and T-shirt are simply silhouetted.  This is the least interesting illustration I know, sorry about that.

 And here's the final image, highlighting how roughly the jacket is painted initially before the final blending and painting.  Oh, and yes I changed the jacked from the Brown one (as seen in Rose) to the black one that's more familiar to most viewers (surprisingly little black int hat black jacket).  If this were the real world I'd need to repaint it, but digitally it's a small job to just move some sliders to change the colours.