Evidently the announcer got his name wrong. Lot's of sketches went into this one- trying to get the guys face right. I'm probably going to draw 2 or 3 more of him in various poses, but hopefully nothing that will take as long as this one, which was ridiculously long (probably about 30 hours). Started in pencil, shaped in Illustrator, and rendered in Photoshop with a bunch of watercolor and acrylic doodads laid in for dramatic effect.

Below, a bunch of the sketches I did trying to find this guy. Mostly done at the lunch counter at Goody-Goody in Wilmington. I always hate when I see a polished illustration and none of the pain and suffering that went into making it is apparent. So in the effort of full disclosure, here's a bunch of the crap I had to get out to get a decent illustration.

I take all these drawings into Photoshop and try to piece together a decent drawing. It would help if I could draw it right the first time, but I usually don't. So it's off to Photoshop to create this composite:

Then I take that into Illustrator to start "shaping" the elements of the illustration. The pen tools are just so handy-dandy in Illustrator for shaping things. After an hour or two, you'll come out with something like this:

That palette is from the Illustrator Color Guide- a really neat feature of CS3. Only problem is- you can't lock it down so I take a screen grab of it and paste it onto the art board so I can keep my palette under control. One day, I won't need to do this.

Then I export the Illustrator file, with it's 30 layers as a layered PSD file so that I can work with each element in a sane way.

Next up is painting a bunch of little doodads that I can use for texture in the illustration. Oh what I'd give to be able to just gouache this baby up without all this computer madness. For now, it's painting little pieces like such:

Became the background gradient

Old toothbrush flicks becomes the boxing ring mat.

Then a bunch of copying, pasting and Photoshop actions that make my life a little easier and you get something that would have looked much better completely analog had you enough patience to simply suck for a while and learn the proper way to do things but no you have to just have it look nice no matter how bastardized the process. Oh well, self. One day... one day.