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

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).

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.