April 26, 2005

15: Gimyowallet (a.k.a. "Daring")

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My last Illustration Friday submission took fifteen minutes to draw. This one took about five hours from start to finish.

The week's theme – daring – gave me an idea almost right away. I wanted to draw a small, shy girl at a Spin The Bottle party, staring down the barrel of a two-litre Coke bottle with a tight gaggle of pointy-fingered, taunting kids hunched behind it. But I couldn't really make it work without reference, and even though Kerry volunteered to pose for me, I came up with a second concept instead – featuring this daring little man (above).

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I sketched this illustration out in pencil pretty much as it's shown above, only at first the fella was facing the goons, back to the viewer with two clenched fists. Once I was confident about it, I added the pen work. I scanned it and added colours and texturing in Photoshop, using overlays of close-up photos of rusted metal I took at a Newfoundland shipwreck site in 2002. Skin tones use the same overlays with inverting and hue shifts. You can click on the thumbnail image (right) for a closer view.


And most importantly: it was a ton of fun to do.

8 comments:

Unknown said...

It's becoming increasingly obvious that you do not have children...who else has that kind of time???? ;-)

Dave

shannon said...

YOU ARE AMAZING! I would love to see you step by step process.

Allan Lorde said...

That's hot, dude! I love the thugs, especially the one with the fungo bat.

Tracey Miller said...

This is a great illustration, and I love that you included an explanation of your process. That stuff is always interesting (at least to me, anyway).

knottydon said...

The characters are soooo Gorillaz type. Love em!!!

Anonymous said...

realy nice drawing and nice colors

Anonymous said...

Fantastic illo, I really like the chraracter designs, they remind me of Jamie Hewlett but with more grit.

Good interpretation as well, very original ! :)

Jeope said...

It was unintentional at first, but Gorillaz started running through my head drawing this so I think it just took off. I definitely based the fat thug on their drummer...Russell? I can't remember names.