Dixie 22!

I suppose I should talk about this, ne? I drew the thumbnail for this while at work, which was really just a scribble of robot zooming out of a triangle that had an arrow pointing to it which said "Why are you yet again drawing modes of transportation? You suck at drawing modes of transportation." And dont say that I dont. If you see a large inanimate object drawn by me, there is a very good chance that it's been drawn from a reference, or sometimes even outline traced. I'll do my own detail work once I have the general shape of it, though.

So, this cover. I did the thumbnail at work a week ago. Figured "I'll do it when I get home" then it slipped my mind. Time passes. I'm sitting on my couch Sunday (the day before release) going "What do I want to do today? I know! I can go see Iron Man again!" then I remember "Crap... I have a Dixie cover due!!" So I start hunting online to find a sutible war era allied submarine that I can reference. I found one, got it all drawn and it looked AWESOME. Really clean lines. Drew Robot, who I actualy dont need a reference for as there is an easy trick with her since she's so geometric. All her detail looked awesome, I positioned her where I wanted her to be to look like she was being torpedoed, I went to merge the Sub line art and the Robot line art AND....

I hit Control + W instead of Control + E. When it popped up asking if I really wanted to close the window, my cursor happened to be over the "no, dont save changes" button and.... Bye bye robot and sub. ::SIGH:: So I started all over, and I didnt spend as much time because at this point it was 10:30 at night. So where before I might have spent an hour on making sure all the lines were strait on Robot and the sub, I spent about 20 minutes just to get it on the page. Coloring on both Robot and the Sub were done using a nifty effect, which I tend to use anytime I need to draw metal, that uses feathering and levels and layer effect embossing. I then did my super secret under water effect (ok, I randomly drew lighter blue streaks coming down from the top of the screen, then did dodges to put in lighter streaks and put the streaking layer infront of the sub but behind Robot.) I've spent a fair amount of time under water (SCUBA!) so I know how light works filtered through 100 feet of ocean. Paint in some bubbles for motion, then all that was left was to put the Umket add together, position the episode title and credits so that they arent in the way of the art, then ship it off to Jeffrey. I finished at about 2 in the morning, but I'll admit that I was heavily distracted, as well, by people IMing me.