A New Commission WIP, and an Update (Patreon)

     Here's what's on my drawing board right now. It's an interesting one. The customer is commissioning a whole series of images around a central theme by various artists: Rick and Morty (of Rick and Morty fame) appearing out of one portal and running across panel toward another portal, with a scene behind them. That scene is a depiction of a comic universe, such as the Avengers fighting Thanos, or a rendering of Gaiman's Endless characters, or in my case, the Boneyard gang roasting hotdogs and marshmallows. When they're all completed, he plans to combine them (digitally, I assume) into one panoramic image. Some of the artists have drawn Rick and Morty in their own style, but I'm really not crazy about doing that. I want them to read instantly as who they are. 

     The image is actually fairly complex, and could easily become a mess, so first I roughed in the background characters to figure out where the foreground characters could go without obscuring anything I needed to show. Then I taped down a sheet of tracing paper and drew Rick and Morty on that to begin with; this allowed me to adjust the size of the characters and their poses without having to erase on the board, and more importantly, to move them around to just where I wanted them. Then I turned the tracing paper over and went over the lines with a medium-grade pencil, flipped it over again, and retraced the lines one last time. (This is just called transferring the image, but I'm going into detail for anyone who's interested and lacks a base of knowledge on the subject.) Next I refined Rick and Morty, then inked them (using the same thin, unvarying line from the series), in essence "setting" them on the page, so they won't smear as I work on the background.

     Lastly (up to this point) I penciled the Boneyard characters and the background beyond them.  This illustration board, by the way, is tough for penciling. It has way more texture than I like. It's even worse for inking, which will be the next step. But it stands up to painting, and Rick and Morty will both be painted (as will the portals).  So that's where I am so far on that.

     Now for the update. No, it's not about cats this time; I'm talking about my laptop going tits-up on me.  Last I heard, there's a glimmer of hope to revive it. We have to order a part and see if it does the trick; if not, we have to pull the hard drive and put it in a hard drive enclosure, to (hopefully) transfer the files to another laptop. So for the moment I'm still in limbo, especially when it comes to posts.  All my art scans are on the damaged laptop, so until I'm fully back up and running my posts will be limited to what I can produce week-to-week. I apologize for that, but I promise I'm working on it. As always, I'll keep you posted.