At Roc Con Day 1

End of a long day and I am exhausted. And mostly all I did was sit and draw. I am still working on a new fake comic book cover. Every conceivable comic and sci character came past me. Some I recognized, some good some bad, some downright scary and some a bit scandalous. But, that is a Comic Con for ya. For my part I mostly stuck to what I was drawing and talking to people as they passed by.

The hard part was last minute work to get ready for today. Had to wait till payday, yesterday, and till after work to pick up some supplies. so I did not get done till about 1 am. And to top it off I did not fall asleep till after 2. Then I got up at 7:30 am and was out by 8:45. One of the things I was waiting to get done were some cards to hand out that fit with the customers I would see here. I recently decided to start creating a series of Star Wars Starfighters.  They take me about a day and a half each to create. Now I need to get a hold of Disney to get copyright permission to "sell" them. So for the time being I make a small number at a time to use as giveaway's to garner some attention to my website and possible garner a commission out of them.

I started with the ARC-170 and the Naboo yellow fighter. Both have plenty of reference photos to work from and I know them well. I also saved images of each step to create a poster of the step by step procedure I use to create one.

First I start with a very rough sketch of the object to get it layed out. From there I go back over it all to draw it the details in pencil.


Once I have the pencil lines drawn I draw over them all with a 005 line pen. When that is all drawn over I erase the pencil.

From here I use a medium tip pen to on all the leading edges to make them bold and make the image pop.

Once that is done it is ready to be scanned into my computer. I load it for my graphics program (GIMP) and I Erase the entire background.





Now for some color, here is is quick and a bit messy but I want to get all the colors on where I want them.






At this point I go back in and clean up all the colors and lines as much as possible.

The final step for the drawing is to go back in and add the shadows, sometimes also highlights too, fade out anything behind glass (the cockpit) and generally go over the whole image once more to make sure it is complete.

Of course there is the background to consider. I create a separate layer for that and using the filters I create the affect I am looking for. I decide I want to put a white border around the ship, I don't want to do it on the same layer as the ship but on the background. So that you can see this, I made the top layer invisible so you can see it on the background. This makes it easy to create the white border without needing to be too careful with the artwork of the ship.

With the top layer visible again you can see the affect I was going for. All that was left to do was add some lettering.






And here it is.

I also made this one before the Con