On the Drawing Board

I’m busy right now on the final coloring for two MAD jobs, plus an ad job and another poster after that, then we’ll see if I get a breather. These “On the Drawing Board” posts are getting harder to do, because I can never show what I am working on as most clients don’t want that made public until after it’s seen print. Instead of “On the Drawing Board” I should started calling them “On the drawing board about 6 weeks ago and I’ve forgotten all about it by now…”

October may have been the busiest month I’ve ever had freelance-wise… at one time I had six jobs going at once, and did over a dozen throughout the month. I even had to spend one of the days on my family trip to Florida holed up at my buddy Keelan’s place doing the color work on an ad job… that I can’t show you until next month. By the time I can show this work to you, it’s like ancient history to me.

Well, I’ve tried to begin scanning in my steps on some of these jobs so when I can post an image it’s not just a “see, lookee here whut aye dun!” sort of thing. In that spirit, here’s a poster job I did last month with some of the steps along the way:

The initial assignment was to create an image of a lady finds that the bathroom remodelers have left the place a mess as they race off for the day. I did a rough of the basic layout to start at about 6″ x 6″… the final poster is going to be 17″ x 17″. This client likes a cartoony look and humor without it being over the top… they are especially concerned that the people depicted are not very outlandish, but animated. Here’s my initial layout sketch:

From here I worked up a tighter pencil at 12″ x 12″ for client review:

The client’s feedback was that they wanted a sense of the woman having just arrived home to find this mess. I reworked the figure to change the body angle, and added the groceries and keys to tell the story a bit more clearly. I did a separate sketch of the new figure to run by them:

Then I placed it in the original sketch and fixed what needed fixing digitally for final approval.

I got the green light, so I transfered the drawing to board at 17″ x 17″ (I ink these at print size since any bigger is just too big to work or scan) for inking. I decided to lose the keys as they were unnecessary. I then inked it:

Following that I started with the color. Here’s a partially finished stage:

Then the final illustration:

Click for a closer look

It takes me a whole day to ink and color one of these, and that’s a very long day. Realistically it’s more like two days. They aren’t complicated but they are big, and that means I have to render things well so they look good up close.

When some of the other jobs I did this month see print, I’ll share them here.