Behind The Scenes: Alien & Cyberdog (Patreon)

I'm a big fan of science fiction and I really love retro futuristic ideas. All those sci-fi movies from 50's and 60's have some magic to them and all the mythos around aliens and Area 51 has it's own style and look that developed over the decades. 

Large alien heads and small grey bodies, flying saucers, antennas. It's all there. So I wanted to create my own character tribute, use the look and feel of retro futurism, but give it a little modern touch.

First, I had to come up with an idea, and I really wanted to show the alien in some casual situation, that would bring him closer to audience, even make him cute somehow. What better way to make someone more approachable, than give him a pet right? :)

Visit the full Pinboard here

I've fired up Pinterest and started gathering some alien references. I was surprised, that there is not that much material around this particular style as I expected. But it was possible to get some references together and I really loved one sketch in particular.

It had a great cartoon style and I loved how the hands and legs were made really pronounced and angular. I moved to search for a suitable pet and I opted for a dog. I've gathered all kinds of robot images, just to get the creative juice flowing and to have a lot of details to get inspired from.

I enjoyed the looks of some robot dog toys, but I didn't want a standard dog head (Do you remember Aibo?). Instead, I wanted the head to be more artificial, so in the end there would be a very thin line in whether the scene is cute, or creepy (imagine just switching the robot's light to red color).

The sketch was really important here, because there were lot's of ways this kind of image could go wrong, so I wanted to get as close to the final composition as possible. Yeah, the pencil's eraser proved his worth once again :)

I started with more dynamic scene with alien in the middle of a walk, looking at a dog, who probably spotted something. I've looked up some alerted dog images and tried to give the cyber dog similar treatment, with front paw up, raised ears and alerted posture.

I was able to get a nice triangle composition of of this with clear line coming from the alien's look down his arm, through the leash and towards the dog, who carries the rest of the story (looking at something).

This is really important, to let your eyes travel along your sketch and try to identify, how the look of the audience will travel and how to adjust your composition accordingly.

You can watch the process video on Youtube 

So that's it for the latest illustration and I hope it will help you with your own work.

See you in the next one! :)