I've been working on other things as well in the meantime but I'll save that for December seeing as how it's a week away and It'll give me sometime to build up more stuff for my December post. Also the fact that December will be CRAZY busy most likely since I'll be starting work on the 30th. Anyway, enough talk because.. I'll be talking more as the post goes!
Piece 1
OK so to kick it off, we had our first 2 meetings in August and early September and we had yet to decide our themes. but eventually after a democratic vote and hilarious suggestion from Lawrence which won over the people we arrived at our theme Robots Cowboys & Dinosaurs. I tried getting an early jump on the work and started roughing out stuff. Keeping with the idea I had in my last book submissions, I wanted something epic and something fun. So I started working with the epic idea first and this is what I wanted, well sort of... a robot train attacking a town with cowboys riding dinosaurs.
I started thumbing more ideas out and as I was going.. for some reason all I could think of was that awful movie Wild Wild West.. and worst was the theme of it was playing through my head. Reguardless I thumbed out some other ideas of angles, like the first one where the cowboys are chasing the train that came to life. Second was a stand off in the town from a worms eye view of it. and the third thumb I was thinking of an old western portrait of a family but to throw it off, a robot butler and the man of the house holding the reigns of a raptor. The 2 on the left are other designs for the robot train where it was more of a snake. I ended up opting those ideas out because I decided to go with a more steam punk-ish look.
after i decided to go steam punk I wanted some head roughs, I wanted it to look intimidating, as you can see I went through a couple of different roughs of an idea for a head. The head is suppose to be part of the actual train engine with the smoke stack on top being an ornament or head crown piece of sorts. Either way things were looking goofy and I ended up messing around with it till I arrived at...
The final head design I went with! I wanted it so that the whole head piece was the engine of the train and it sort of unfolded upon it. I tried making logistics of it's tranformation, but it's like trying to make sense of how G1 transformers "tranformation" make sense. and they don't. (but I still love it) Anyway the main section was to sit behind the head, I guess where the evil mastermind is suppose to control the thing.
First rough of several, this was just one of maybe three I did for the first one. basic idea was that the robot was attacking the town.
rough 2 I changed the head tilting and re-drew it again since I wanted to get comfortable with it.
After talking with Ragnar and my roommate Mike batting around ideas. Mike came up with a cool thumb while we were talking and the angle looked awesome, so I set about reworking a thumbnail and this is what I arrived at. Slight dutch tilt, floor shot with a crazy up angle. So a group of people charging a giant train, I ended up calling him Monstrotrain at last minute and I suck and naming stuff. the thing in the fore ground was suppose to be a piece of paper. The piece of paper was suppose to have on it "World Fair Expo: Most advanced locomotive coming to the new world!" to try and give a story to why the train exists. needless to say I scrapped the idea, too much work.
So after lots and lots of drawing and clean up here was the final with crop lines. I referenced a lot of stuff from it to make the train look very authentic in terms of piping and gears etc. and steam punky.. and referenced the dinosaurs for looks and structure. The Robot took 3 days of work, 1 day spent for just the head area. the Dino riders in the foreground took a day, then the guys running around finished another day. The original cropping I had here wasn't right I felt like I was cutting off too much so I scaled it back and cleaned it up and then...
The final line work! I went in and cleaned it up more fixed some things around, thickened the line work more and got this! This piece ended up taking me the longest and basically ate up all my time. The worst part was, I had to head back to Ontario while I was doing this, and I'd miss the deadline while I was away, so I packed up my tablet PC and all the hardware, and dragged it back to Ontario. The final version of it, with colour, is in the book. I since I had spent so much time doing line work, and had little to no time to do a second piece and think about colouring, I ended up handing the colouring to my friend Steph Sim, who THANKFULLY helped me wrap this piece up since I was simply trapped for time. All in all, I was happy with this piece but next time to make it feel like I did everything I'll make sure I can budget my time well enough to do it all myself.
Piece 2
Piece 2 was a rush, I was in Toronto and running out of time while running around with a wedding and my grandma's birthday it was BUSY. but luckily I had a sort of quite night one night, and the idea hit me. Went out, got an extra large double double and sat down to hammer ideas out. The first thumb, top right was the idea I wanted to have where I have them swap out brains. I thought it'd be funny but I decided against it since I wanted something simple and with impact. the second thumb was sort of in the right direction. but I needed to have a way to have less details and rely more on just shapes. The robot on the left started up as line work then I ended up filling it in to get uhh.. a really crude looking robot.
i was still trying to think through my idea so I just ended up toying around with the robot. and while I was goofing around with it, the idea suddenly struck me.
Extreme angle and bright colours, strong sillouettes that I could fill in small details into and then put some overlay in the background to fill space up. So I ended up hacking away at it until about 6am.
What I ended up with was this as my rough. The final copy is again in the book. I ended up going back and adding small details where I could and really cleaning it up, but it uh sort of looks like this, just way more cleaned up.
So yeah that's my update for now. uhh, there is more, but again I'll save it for a big end of year post. I'll probably have more by then for sure. Actually I already have alot but I end up talking way too much in my blogs.
Comments and crit's welcomed as usual, look forward to my next post where I'll have more other drawings and stuff!
