Anatomy of a Fan ArtWhere does it all come from? There are many ways to put together a piece of artwork. For my Futurama Pyrate pieces, I've been culling bits and pieces from various sources and cobbling them togther to suit the needs at hand. I may grab a few screen grabs and cut and paste parts into new poses, some stuff I just sketch in Photoshop using the Wacom Tablet and Stylus. With the exception of the Robot Devil and Zapp Brannigan, all the backgrounds are from photos that I took. I've never grabbed from other fan art. Yet. If I do, it will be soley with the reason of tributing the fan art in question.
When I did the Fry piece, I wanted to find a pose that I thought I remembered as a James Dean pose. (hinted at in the teaser pic with the blurry Amy in the foreground and Fry in the shadows). Appropos, as it is a well known fact that Fry's regular series clothes are actually what James Dean wore in
Rebel Without a Cause. Well, I couldn't find the pose I was looking for, so I ended up using the pose from the promo picture for
Giant.
While working on the piece, I kept thinking to myself "Why does that house look so familiar?" Then I happened to catch the episode
Where the Buggalo Roam on AS, and it hit me. - That's Amy's parent's house.
Yet another James Dean connection. I had wanted to include the house in the Fry Pyrate pic as a painting on the wall or something, but it just wasn't woking out, so I dropped the idea.
I do the pics in Photoshop using layers.
One layer is the background, then I have a "construction" layer where I assemble all the poses and sketch work, then over that is a solid white layer that I make transpartent to use to fade out the sketch layer. Then a top layer that I use for the final "Inking". When the black line work is done, I go back to the white layer, make it solid again (not transparent) and do all my coloring, shading, and maybe some lighting effects on that layer. (Erasing all the extra white from around the outside of the figure being done.) All this is done at 200 dpi.
When the piece is finished, I flatten the layers and resize the piece to the dimmensions I want, and reduce the dpi to 72 and save as a JPEG.
Here's a breakdown of the layers.
The sketch layer gets trashed.
The white areas seen below are actully transparent or clear when working in layers.
Shown is, the final "inked" or black line layer, then the color layer, then the color layer with lighting effects added, then the final image.
Thanks everybody for the kind words and appreciation of my work.