Welp… Ya Blew it.

Welp… Ya Blew it…

Ya blew it, and look how sad you made Captain Planet. It’s like you missed his birthday.

Really liking how this came out, actually. It was a fun experimental process as well. Lemme walk you through it.

Started out sketching, per usual.

Really wanted to do something Captain Planet related and was teasing it on Facebook.

Didn’t really have a vision in mind, but I know I wanted to make Cap kinda weird looking, along the same lines, but not exactly like Welcome to Erfbound. Disproportioned. Chubby. Just kinda gross looking. You know.

Some one on the Facebook page said it lookde like a Garbage Pale Kids drawing. Can’t say I disagree. Drew that boi with my mechanical pencil, snapped a photo with my ancient phone, and imported it into Illustrator. Then, I took a great deal of time doing what I always do.

I traced the sketch with the my best pal, Pen Tool.

For a good chunk of time, too. I consider myself somewhat of a master with the pen tool now, but this one took me a minute. Mainly because I didn’t know how I was handling certain elements of the sketch, so there was a lot of experimentation. More on that a bit later, okay? I also penned some of the highlights on his weird, latex gloves and boy shorts… Who designed this character!? (the answer is Ted Turner, surprisingly.)

Next, I started blocking in some color.

Gotta keep it limited, you know? Don’t want too many colors mucking up the scene. I said “welp, why don’t I stick with the classic red white and blue, YOU KNOW?” (Happy 4th of July!) Purple inking seemed to agree with that pallet too.

Threw some sweet blue into his even sweeter mullet, dabbled some light gre for the skin…
And you know I stayed true to that beautiful
latex. Experimented with some more halftone-ish shading too. Decided hell yeah I’ll color the rest like that! Basically step and repeated a billion lines, drew out the shadow segment I wanted filled with halftones, selected both, and used that sweet pathfinder tool to get the result you see on the here.

Then I moved onto adding some highlights for good measure. Nothing too overpowering. Just a little bit on the face… A little on the tears… A little to bring out the texture of the suit… Etc.

Kept up the halftones with for the shadows as well. I imagined the light would be hitting him from the left, therefore most of the shadows I drew were on the right side of his body. I made sure to keep the series of repeated lines I used earlier on their own layer so I could apply the exact same halftone effect to the other portions of the drawing. It was a bit time consuming but, I think I got the desired effect.

Moved on to the background!

This was harder than I thought it would be. Didn’t have a set plan in motion, so basically I said WELP LET’S JUST WING IT. First I traced the clouds with either the pen tool or a bunch of ellipses. Next, I drew a sphere with the ellipse tool and started hacking away at it, subtracting pieces with the pathfinder tool. I wanted to keep pumping out this halftone coloring theme, you can see it on the cracks in the planet as well as the cloud. Had to keep cycling the visibility of the layers to see if it would work. IT DID.

Used the pen tool and ellipse tool to make the mushroom cloud. This part was tricky. Took me a good chunk of time to figure out how I wanted to shading to work on the cloud, but I got it to where I liked it eventually.

Drew the bursts with the pen tool, too. Applied the same shading to those too!

And that’s it pretty much! Welp… Ya Blew it is available at all the shops! Grab it at REDBUBBLE. Snag it at Society6! Check it out at Design By Humans!

I’ll do a product showing later.