Monday, August 30, 2010

Small Wonders

My two best friends are Micronauts--um, let's be generous--"enthusiasts". I, on the other hand, have never read a single issue. I do feel a little bad about that but I also feel like I've missed the Micronauts bus. There's no way I could go back and read them and have them live up to the praise I've heard. It would be like me demanding someone read 80's G.I.Joe and expect it to rock their world. All that said, I still had a blast doing this piece and I can now claim to know the names of all the Micronauts shown above. I can also say that in some small way I drew it not only for the person who commissioned the piece but for my friends who still dream their Micronaut dreams.
Because I had it on hand, I thought I'd share with you the rough sketch I started with. With almost all my commissions I first do a smaller, initial drawing. I do this because I am a complete failure at drawing large. The level of detail in the original drawing can vary greatly (in this case it's somewhere in the middle) and the drawing can also vary in size--anywhere from approx. 8"x10" to around 2"x3". In this case, Baron Karza (foreground, for those of you unfamiliar), was drawn at about 4"x6" and then scanned in and, at that point, the background characters were all sketched in Photoshop. Once I had the basic image I blew it up to 9"x12", printed it up, and then cleaned it up, refined it, by tracing it on my lightbox.

3 comments:

Anton said...

Love it man!! Well played.

Christian Lipski said...

Woohoo! Big Micronauts fan since #11. Even after Bug and Marionette hooked up, though my heart was BROKEN.

Great work there!

Steven said...

Ahhh those were the days... Star Wars knock-off storylines paired up with Japanese toys. Megaman.... Micronauts.... call it what you will but it's all great stuff to kids of the 70s and 80s. Yeh! Super job with the art! Brings back memories.