The Insane Ramblings of a Slightly Evolved Monkey: The 11 Doctors

Hi everyone, or no one? Here is a breakdown of my Picture of the 11 Doctors, which really is only a Thumbnail that I am using to plan out a much larger Acrylic Painting. I will project it onto a 22x32 piece of illustration board and Draw it out. So I left the photoshop work a little sloppy knowing that I am just going to be Drawing all the hands again anyways I didn't waste my time here. (arghh Hands!)

anyhoo here we go...

The whole thing springs from Bill and Ted (ironic?) I really love the Iconic hanging out moment and I wanted that with The Tardis so I took a screengrab.

Then I Traced out the position of the guys cause I like the energy and its a good starting point.

Next I Draw in the Tardis in a different perspective and distort my front guys into place. And then try to fit in all 11 of them This is where I made the decisions of composition like Tennant hanging on to the scarf and Smith at the top with the fez. Then I hunted for Images with that in mind.

Mainly I was looking for facial expressions, Tennant looking surprised, Smith holding the fez, Tom Baker, holding the hat with his scarf visible, and Eccleston with a big grin. The others were lucky finds and they ended up placing themselves in the image.

I grabbed a shot of the Time Vortex, I liked this one because of the Lightning bolt, I rotated it into a better composition and Painted in the missing parts.

I grabbed some shots of the Tardis and skewed it into place. The key is to do one side at a time and use the Transform>distort function to match the perspective I wanted, then I painted in the bottom.

At this point I crop out all of the reference pics and place them. Then paint in the arms and pieces to fill in the gaps. Each doctor is on its own layer and I work on a new layer then merge with the photo. Because I merge them down to individual layers I don't have the Process images to show what i've done but essentially I just clean up the edges and roughly paint in the missing anatomy to tie them all together.

Here it is at the end of my photoshop portion of the work, you can see I have extended the canvas to give it more room and rotated things around and changed the placement a bit. The advantage of having them on separate layers is I can endlessly nudge them around. I finished painting in Tennant and Mccoy and used the Transform>warp feature on their bodies to give that nice curve and motion, also because I suck at foreshortening. As always whenever you add or transform an element you have to go in and paint over it a bit to fix the wonkiness. And thats about it shake well and serve... Time to prep my board for drawing!

I start by painting my surface medium grey with Gesso this gives me a nice surface that acrylics stick to very well. The key is to wet the back of your board or paper first then Gesso the Front and leave it to dry. That way both sides dry at the same time and the board wont warp (much.)

Next I project my photoshop comp onto the board and pencil it in with a light pencil. It's usually hard to see so you keep checking back and forth with the projector and a printed photo to make sure you get the placement of the major forms. It's important to remember that you are making a 2d representation of 3d forms and should follow your gut as much as the reference. Just tracing a photo wont make the drawing work it'll look really stupid, you have to interpret what you see into shadow and light areas.

Next I erase everything until I can barely see it and Start Drawing with a darker pencil and looking closely at the photo for specific features that create the resemblance of your subject.

Next I did an Acrylic Wash over everything to set my Drawing in Place. MISTAKE!!!! It created blotchy areas that were a PITA for the rest of the process. Nowadays I spray my stuff down with a workable fixative, It works so much better.

Next I painted in my blacks

and then my colors, usually I leave color for the next part of the process but The specific costumes made me choose to lay some in ahead of time.

Next I lay in the colors and skin tones with an airbrush. Very lightly to preserve the drawing underneath.

Then the fun part I go back in with Prismacolor Pencil Crayons (colored pencils for you Yanks!) and I add in the bright highlights with white and move onto reestablishing the darks.