Worx in Progress: The Unabominable Snowman

Here's a piece that started out for the Art Order holiday challenge where artists were asked to interpret classic holiday characters in whatever way the wanted. If you unfamiliar with the Art Order community that was started by Wizards of the Coast AD Jon Schindehette, it's a great blog to follow for not only those interested in fantasy/sci-fi genre illustration, but there's a lot of wisdom on business and professional development in general. I ended up being a few days late on the challenge deadline, but I can't argue with getting a portfolio piece out of my work.

I did a take on the abominable snowman. A hunter, who I imagine to be French Canadian for some reason, is looking to bring back Mr. Abominable dead or alive... well, actually, he's just looking to bring him back dead. Much to the hunter's chagrin, the abominable snowman is a friendly, good-natured creature and wants to celebrate the Yule season with a big sloppy kiss under the mistletoe. Below is a bit of the process work from beginning to end, starting with sketching.


I think I have some sort of disorder because I can't seem to do much of a sketch with a composition I like unless it's something around 3". I'm a little disappointed that I didn't carry the sense of scale between the snowman and the hunter through to the finish, but some times you learn as much from messing up or more than your successes alone.





When I started to think about what this abominable snowman could look like, initially I thought of older renditions of the character, the old Rankin Bass holiday stop-motion movies, where he's kind of ape-like. I wanted to come up with a slightly different look even if I wasn't going to deviate too far from the color palettes traditionally used for an abominable snowman, so I developed my sketches while looking at pictures of sloths. The snowman eventually ended up with a bit of a teddy bear look to him with a hint of the original sloth concept.


The color study above was done quickly for my own reference while I was building for the shoot. It's essentially the sketch I did earlier, traced over with a little refining to closer resemble my characters and some colors laid down in Photoshop.

As luck would have it, the theme for Illustration Friday is "winter", so I'll get a bit more mileage out of this piece. I also hope to post up some shots of the puppets from this one, I really like the way they turned-out!!

Hellboy 15th Anniversary Group Show

Last Friday, Dec. 4th, I had the pleasure of showing in the Autumn Society's Hellboy group show. It was a fun night and I would like to thank everyone for their hard work in organizing the show. I decided to make my own rendition of Hellboy's gilled side-kick Abe Sapian. The piece is titled "Two Lost Souls Swimming in a Fishbowl". I liked the basic design of the character and I enjoy his quirks, Abe's love of classical music for one. Along with the finished illustration, I've included some work in progress shots and detail shots.

-Poster by Peter Wonsowski & Justin Grey

-Basic sketch and color study. I couldn't find the right object to make the phonograph have that nice arcing fluted shape. This is the down-side to working with found object elements, you have to find the parts of things to use them. As I was working in time constraints, I had to settle for a smaller cone shape. The composition has also changed somewhat from the sketch to the finish.

-On the right of this photo is a kind of "visual shopping list" comprised of collected reference and I also attached a couple of swatches of fabric that I knew I was going to use to make the main figure, Abe Sapian.

-This is a detail of the phonograph in the shot. I wanted to include it because it is out of focus in the finished illustration and I like the way it turned-out. It's constructed from a ring box, armature wire, K&S aluminum pipe, the top of a cone incense burner, a washer and a couple of nails.