Social Profiling № 3: Larry

If you've strolled into this post you can see what it's all about, and the previous related entries here (for Owain) and here (for Steve). OK, so hopefully everyone's now on the same page. Good.

I was hoping to get this posted about an hour ago, so it would count as an extra post for January, but sadly poor old January is now going to miss out on it due to a series of cockups. Actually only one cockup was responsible for the post's delay, the other two probably saved it from being even later (one was the loss of over an hours progress in New Vegas. Most upset about that I was).

Anyway, enough about all that rubbish. Hold on to your hats, it's time for Larry.

And there we go. Clicking the image will bring it up to eyeball searing dimensions, as usual.

Now Larry was an interesting one to do because I don't know him from Adam's (That's an in-joke kids, don't worry if you don't get it). He's the only facebook friend I have that I've never met in the flesh at least once. Why is he my facebook friend? Because I'm friends with his Brother and his brother commented on a picture of Captain America I did (You can see it here). So Larry saw the comment, and thus the pic and decided he wanted to be friends with me. Fine with me, but it does mean that everything I know about Larry is what's up on facebook, plus a little his brother's said about him.

So, I went and had a look at his photo's to see if I could find one that sparked something, and found this:

I liked that. I liked the juxtaposition of the serious looking Larry with the Hello Kitty rings. But just copying that wasn't good enough for me - oh no, certainly not. Larry's posture put me in mind of a certain Marvel comicbook character. He's not all that well known, goes by the moniker of "Wolverine" or something... I figured that since he'd become my friend over one Marvel character he'd probably quite like the other*.  Anyway, for that to work well. I'd have to shave a few pounds off, add some more hair and hope to heaven that it still looked remotely like him afterwards.

Here's the step by step - More words afterwards.

So as you can probably tell this one was done partly "for real" in that I started out on paper.  I felt this was probably the best way to get a real comic strip look to it.  I grabbed a photo of my hand in the same position as Larry's, but in a fist, and then started sketching.  Once I'd done that I scanned it, so if I fluffed the next bit I could still ink it in ArtRage.  Decided the Hello Kitty thing needed to be kept, but I expanded on it by adding the cork and the fry to the other claws (the cork is of course a reference to Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) , and the fry is just something you might find on an actual three pronged utensil - though in retrospect it should have been a hot dog.

Once I was happy with the pencils I moved on to inking.  I went out of my way to make the inking rougher than I usually do it as I felt the looser style would work better in this case.  That's not to say I rushed it though... well, I rushed the claws because I couldn't find my French Curves (like a ruler, but curvy), but that came back to bite me.  Inks looked good, onward to Photoshop; via my scanner.

The 3rd picture is the Photoshop cleanup I did. As you can see I cleaned up the claws - which ended up taking longer than the inking did (with the French Curves I could have done it far faster, but I still don't know where they are).  I also added a highlight to his eyes and removed some of the shadow from his top lip.  I could have done this on the original, but it didn't occur to me until I was in Photoshop.

Then, for picture number 4, I took the cleaned up inks into ArtRage for colouring.  I sort of wish I'd not added the darker colours to his arm now as I don't like the result, but at the time I was happy with it.  Not much else to say about the colouring really - I used the Blue and Yellow from the foreground image, and intended to use them in a way that pushed the eye onto Larry's face as I found with the black and white version my eyes tended to stray to his ear.  at first the colours were the other way aroud, but I found that by placing the yellow on the right my eyes would move over to the left - I have no idea why, but it was an interesting discovery. Hmmm, I guess I did have a bit else to say about the colouring after all.

Finally I took the coloured image back into Photoshop to degrade it some what. The intention was to get a late 80's/early 90's comic strip look, and I think I succeeded.  The techniques used in the aging process were almost identical to those used in my Nick Fury picture, and my brother's Iron Giant card, but I discovered that by scanning tissue that's been crumpled and flattened you get a much better paper texture for use as an overlay, which was quite useful.

And that's all there is to it.  I'm still not sure if it's a good likeness, but Larry's brother Wayne was the first commenter on the facebook posting of it (consisting mostly of "hahahahaha") and Larry said it was "Awesome" and made it his profile pic immediately.  Score one for me (horrah!).

One more to go, and I do believe it'll be the toughest of the lot.  I may have another post before I get to that one though, so until the next time,

Exelsior!

 *I really should get around to doing a DC character one of these days.