from the start, this job has been an intensely hectic, yet amazingly great, new experience. it's a bit like releasing diarrhea on a moving train-- if you've done it, you know exactly what i mean and if not, one day you will. and it will be intensely hectic, yet amazingly great.
i've actually split this post into two parts because it was just way too fucking long as one. i went to proofread it (sometimes i actually do), and couldn't bring myself to read the entire thing-- which is sad considering i wrote it-- but maybe splitting it will help. it'll be like a peter jackson film.
anyway, the very first dragon was drawn on a post-it note and with a very vague guideline involving words like "snarky" and phrases like "not cute, but likeable." also, judging by the facial expression (and the pizza box beneath the post-it), i may have been a bit drunk while drawing.
tada!to be honest, i sort of winged it. at the time, i had no reason to believe i was going to get the gig and figured it'd be best to just draw something real quick-- straight from my mind-- without a lot of extra thought.
the cigarette was meant as a visual pun. the smokey breath of a dragon.
so, i got hired, and we had a sort of "i like this part, but don't like this part" chat in hopes to nail the exact dragon the team wanted. and the cigarette was removed quickly. fair is fair.
overall, my dragon needed to be a bit more sophisticated and a little less belligerent. david, my new boss, flipped through my moleskine and pointed out a drawing of a glutinous spider sipping merlot in an armchair and told me it had the right "james bond villain feel" that he was looking for.
also, my dragon was lightly referred to as looking like he's "just come off a three-day bender."
i guess that can happen when the illustrator is in the middle of a five-year bender.
so, i went home and drew a more sophisticated dragon, which i thoroughly disliked.
luckily, they disliked it equally and we started over. the addition of the wings was good-- he was now a dragon and not a dinosaur or an odd combination of a cow and a lizard-- the horns were still ridiculous and the dragon as a whole was "too human."
it was something about his face-shape.
after a day and a stack of post-its, we came across the final dragon.
around then, i had a slight worry that my shanty charade was about to be called out. i mean, i should've never gotten the job-- i'd never used adobe illustrator and had no fucking clue how vector drawings worked. i'd told them i knew all about those things when i sent the first dragon rendition, but that was back when i wasn't sure i'd even land the gig. it's sort of like how you act like you have open availability when you're at an interview, even though you know damn well you're going to ask for weekends off as soon as you get hired.
i lied to them to get the job. so what? so i was the kid who could mix brass monkeys and told someone at a hotel that i had bartending experience-- it'd never caused any problems previously.
except, you know, i had five days till my ten completely digital drawings needed to be turned in.
and i knew it was only a matter of time before they sat back and said, "so you've been emailing us pictures of doodles on post-it notes... and those pictures were clearly taken with your camera phone. wtf is going on?"
but instead, something oddly magical happened.
instead of firing me or calling my ridiculous bluff, david drove to my house, carrying a wacom tablet like a glorious digital pizza and told me it was a present to help me vector. it was like he was paying me to learn how to do what i had pretended to already know.
i think around then, i changed my facebook status to "president wishnack is doing it poor man style!" and some peopled liked it without having a clue as to what they were liking specifically. but, they were liking the fact i got hired with a post-it doodle and somehow wound up with a $200 digital tablet in the process.
i totally listened to the jefferson's theme song while installing the new device.
but drawing on the thing was a whole new medium-- in fact, you all saw my very first digital drawing-- and adobe illustrator's lack of intuitive design made things a sweaty fight. it reminded me of the time i had tried to teach myself how to draw with my left hand-- just retarded beyond belief, like i'd been stripped of a super power.
but what i do know about myself is that when money is on the line i can learn at an amazing speed. i mean, i didn't even own a camera when i started as a camera salesman and grew to become the #1 seller (though mr. addison will debate that he was the #1, to which i will kindly remind him my wingmanning his extended service plans was a huge part of his success.)
the point is, this being my first paid illustration gig
of course, back then, i was still drawing on my post-its. i would complete the sketch manually, take a picture of it with my nikon, alter the contrast on photoshop, and then trace it on illustrator. it was like letting meat rot so that i could attract flies in hopes to attract a spider which i could sell for enough money to buy more meat to rot: just backwards and time-wastingly circular. but, that was the horribly inconvenient extent of my abilities.
and it worked which is all that matters. president wishnack is doing it poor man's style.
then came the coloring process, which you've all likely heard me whine about. we started with six potential colors and one very sarcastic dragon.
and then we moved onto the more specific coloring process.
i was extra frustrated at that time because i was given two weeks to draw ten different versions of the dragon and we hadn't locked down a color. i think i had about six or seven drawn out in black and white and a few in temporary color. the main problem was that illustrator does not allow you to color the same way photoshop does-- while photoshop makes great use of its paint bucket, click and done, illustrator can only color closed objects and most of the time that required me to trace my initial brush lines with an invisible pencil line before then coloring. it was, essentially, like drawing the same thing twice.
if photoshop was my ever-giving, expense-free prostitute, illustrator was my high-maintenance girlfriend who would ruin my night if i took too long responding to her texts.
though, illustrator and i have grown a lot since we first met and we are working things out a lot better than before. and ultimately, prostitutes aren't for me anyway.
in the end, the team landed on a pepto-bismol pink with a yellow belly. i spent sleepless nights trying to color the damn guy and as i did, i accidentally learned a few tricks-- though none were very helpful at the time.then, about two days after the color had been locked down, i got word that the team had argued for a few days over the color of his belly before deciding it ought to just be colorless.
oh, and to everyone who promised i would hear the phrase: it happened. "it'll really make the image pop!"
nowadays, changing the color of a character is a two second operation for me. but when i was just starting on illustrator, asking me to change the color was like asking me to start over.
so, two days before my deadline, i went mildly hermit, started over, and finished the ten dragons.
what i didn't know was that the team was growing to love him more and more and while i was drawing his face, the stand-up comedians were writing his lines and he was evolving into something pretty extraordinary.that's when they asked me to be a salaried employee and hit me with the next assignment:
five four-framed comics featuring the dragon in six days. twenty drawings in six days.
it was double the amount of work with less than half the amount of time. and that is when i stopped updating this blog.
part ii's coming soon enough. in the meantime, you can like snapdragon here and vote for it here. eh? eh?
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