Shenanigans & Tomfoolery

Here’s my latest coloring piece.

And no, I did not draw and color this to make a statement on how The Walt Disney Company is an evil, blood-sucking corporation.

Process and stuff after the break.

I almost gave up on this one a couple of times. My original idea was to draw a “badass Mickey” (probably inspired by that Epic Mickey piece I posted a while back) but after being unable to settle on just how to go about doing that, I decided to go in the opposite direction and make him more demonic and scary looking, which is something I always enjoy.

The only rule I imposed upon myself was that Mickey was to wear his original costume (and I realized just now that his buttons are supposed to be yellow but whatever). I also decided early on that I wasn’t going to ink it because I wanted the linework to be muddy and sketchy which suits the piece better, I think. I also added some crosshatching to give that extra bit of texture to the drawing. The pencil drawing was done quickly (I may have rushed it a bit actually) but I ran into some problems when I started coloring it.

My preferred coloring method is basically this: start with flat colors, add shading and highlights in a hard-edged, cartoon style and then throw some gradients on top to add a little roundness. I’m very comfortable with this method but, for some reason, I decided to go with a more airbrush kind of approach here. Needless to say, I failed miserably. About halfway through I discarded the coloring I had done and started from scratch.

Things ran rather smoothly after that initial coloring frustration and what you see above is the end result of that. It’s been a while since I colored directly over pencils so that was fun. The final piece didn’t end up being what I originally had in mind and I could’ve cleaned up some of the borders where the color bleeds but it’s a good effort overall, I think.

Here’s a nifty progress animation:

PS: I had to deal with a lot of this as I worked on this piece. Freakin’ cat would jump on my desk and just lay there on top of my Wacom until I petted her enough. I realized I just had to take a photograph of it.

Related posts:

1. Looking forward to Epic Mickey.
2. Hell’s Kitchen – Page 1, Color Test
3. Mario vs. Mega Man
4. Mega Man and Bosses 2

Posted in Illustration |