The EPIC Series: Making of "Mistakes+Failures"

I have never tried to breakdown how I go through drawing a picture or designing anything but I figured that this would be a pretty neat one to do.

First, let me say that although I did a quick sketch on paper, I never did scan it in-instead I decided to free-hand the entire thing.  I would liken this picture to using acrylic paint or chalk because even though I did draw all the lines and things you see here, there was a heavy amount of me 'pushing' the 'paint' around and 'smearing' the colors with my pen...so, not a traditional drawing by any means but IF I had to do this on a canvas, it would have been done exactly the same way-well, except that here I could fine tune the colors and I didn't need to wash paint off my hands when I was done.

Ok, on to what I used...

Primarily my wacom tablet and pen with Photoshop but for a small portion of it, I had to use Sketchbook Pro.

The pen I am using has a nylon tip but I replaced that with a felt tip for all of the grey areas after they were drawn in-I pushed the color around like I would if I were using chalk or charcoal.  Ok, now for the breakdown...

I began with a black background and on the next layer, I put down my basic white and more black around it-I put a 'red' border around where I put the 'paint' down so I could tell where my drawing was.

The next step for me was putting basic color and lines down to give me an idea where my shadows and grades would end up.

Here I started blending everything together and cleaning up edges...this would just be the first step in many that I would use that felt tip on my pen.

Now this is interesting; note-that it was here, after I began cleaning up most of the head and eyes, working my way down the jaw that I discovered that I drew in (5) teeth between the canines instead of (4) -this is where I shaped them and fixed the number of teeth.

Now this is starting to look much better; by the time I got to this point, I was about 4 hours of drawing into it.

Ok, this is my skull, I needed to make a few layers of this one to overlay each other for more depth.  I eliminated the 'red' outline because I didn't need to worry about the grey edges on the drawing anymore.

I needed to darken the layer to add a little depth, this was done multiple times and when I put them transparently over each other...

...and making highlights and lowlights on different pieces...

...They begin to resemble our finished skull.

Now to begin working on that background-I removed a lot of the black (but not all of it) around the skull and put in my streaky lines using that nylon tip.

I started laying down the yellow color highlights around the edges and fading it gently...I also brushed out a sort of 'splash' around the skull; eventually I will have to adjust the color because I just wouldn't be happy with it.

As I began adjusting the color, I wanted a sort of 'hell fire' that the skull was coming out of; for this I used a stippling technique and put in dark shadows as I went along.

I darkened the entire edge of the canvas with reds and blacks to give it some more depth.

There were a total of 43 different layers by now and I was still adding darker layers of shadowing for more depth.

I drew in the white tear so I could render it using my felt tip brush later but first, I added that sphere that wound be exploding in the skull's mouth.  This was achieved by 6 different drawings, layered on top of each other-these were more precision drawings than the chalk type...small pen tip and a lot of concentration.

Now you see that I have finished drawing in all of the layers of drawings for the exploding sphere and the layers for the sphere now total around ten by itself-although I would adjust the color slightly in the finished product, the drawing would be done...right after I carefully made that tear look realistic.

And here we are, the finished product...I hope you understand a little better about what I go through to make one of these; this in particular was about the average-quite a lot of them have much more going on and require many more individual drawings and layers to look as complete as they do.  This one topped out at around 78 layers.  I hope you enjoyed checking it out-maybe someday I will actually tell you how I got the idea, what I was thinking about as I was doing it and why I wanted everything to look like it does-but that will have to wait for another day.

Thank you all for checking it out-NEW blog tomorrow and maybe even some more artwork before I release Friday's piece...
-jason.