Illustration Step Thumbnails

INTERCEPTION...
	Originally, the only thumbnail was the one on the left, Interception. Some months later, while flipping through my sketchbook, I saw it and thought, "There's another caption that could fit (with minor changes): Interference. So, I did a quick thumb of a very extreme interference situation and decided to develop both designs simultaneously (You try drawing and painting two different designs simultaneously. You'll probably do like I did--work just one at a time, but bring both designs through a stage before proceeding to the next. That works a lot better). Click on any illustration for an enlargement.
The full size sketches that are the bases for what comes after. One thing I decided upon right from the start was to keep everything the same from I to I: Receiver and defender would be the same animal with same team colors. This decision was entirely the effect of working on these at the same time. I thought it should be made clear what was being depicted. Even though it is obvious to me who's who, I've received some very confused comments on letters at times (not 'confusing' comments, the comments didn't confuse me at all. It was person making the comment who was confused - ain't it always?), so I'm playing it conservatively--I've bought uniforms for both teams.
	This is the line drawing that gets transferred to the "good" paper -- where things get "tightened up" and finalized. These letters are fairly unique in the sense that it is usually at this stage when I look at reference material to "fix" areas for accuracy. This time, however, I used references at the sketchbook stage. The reason being, I was ready for them much earlier than usual -- I knew I would need references, and there was never a problem trying to make the characters fit inside the letter's contour, so I looked at what references I had right away. One of the big things that gets accomplished in my sketchbook (not always, but mostly) is seeing if the idea in the thumbnail can actually be accomplished with the "real" letter's outline--doesn't always. If all letters were as easy in that regard as the I . . . I traced the sketches, fixing as I went. If you compare the sketches and final line drawings, you'll only see minor differences.
The watercolor dye stage. I hadn't picked up a brush in some time, so I spent more time than usual on this stage . . . ending up with illustrations that are more finished than usual at this stage, too (not at all a bad thing).
	The colored pencil stage where all the work is done, although as I indicated above, a lot of the work was already done by the dyes in the previous step.
The final stage where I apply acrylics to either fix the problems I created somwhere along the line and couldn't fix by the time I got to the end of the colored pencil stage, or to add highlights/deepen darks that got polluted by the dirty nature of color pencils. So here you have Interception and Interference.
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