FurDU 2019 Conbook Submission (Patreon)

HARROW!

Here's something I've been busy with the past 3 weeks since returning from my new year's vacation. Conventions in the western hemisphere are relatively expensive for me to attend, let alone setting up a booth in dealer's den. Since attending FurDU last year, which is in Australia, Gold Coast, is much closer 6-(8-hour flight) and financially more feasible, I felt that I might want to expand my audience down under. A large following of my readership hails from the US, yet are mostly out of my physical reach and ability to interact with in person. Book signings have been for the most part, highly impractical. So here's an attempt to reach out to potential, new audiences in Australia, that will appear in FurDU 2019's convention book.

SKETCH

Initially I was gonna be lazy and just color over this... But since this was gonna be printed in a conbook, it needed some serious cleaning up. I've also adjusted the pointing arm which feels kinda hunched in a weird manner in the original. I "tightened" up the line work, clarified some details to make them more readable and reworked the "blacks" so that the shadows read better.

The convention theme this year is "Back to the Beach" or "apocalypse beach". Think Mad Max, Tank Girl and Fallout. I went with a furry version of Immortan Joe. If you know my work, I've always loved comics and their color treatment. It's something I can relate to more than digital paint - which admittedly, I'm terrible at and have little interest in pursuing. I take great inspiration from the colorists who've worked on the covers and pages of Image Comics' "Invincible". It's my favorite superhero comic.

CLEAN UP

The face is more readable now. There's a lot of white zones so I had to roll the details over to another weekend to complete. A lot of time really went mostly into refining the line art. I do prefer the new face mask. Initially I was trying too hard to make it look like the original Immortan Joe's mask, but the problem with the silhouette was that it became hard to distinguish the feline facial structure.

FLAT COLORS

The next step was really to work out the color scheme of the image and get an overall feel of how the colors were gonna interact with the BG. I went mostly with a reddish theme based on the storm chase scene in Mad Max: Fury Road. I gave the shadows a bluish purple hue so it would contrast with the reds and help the character "pop" out more. I could've just gone with gray tone shadows but I recall that Invincible would often color their shadows and not just have them gray especially for cover art.

So that's my process breakdown. Hope this is something interesting for you guys. I'll be working on new projects now that this has been cleared off my slate. See you guys next month! Cheers!

Snares
Jan 2019