Hey! What is up! Today I'm gonna give ya'll a glimpse BEHIND THE MAGICIAN'S CURTAIN and show you how I created that t-shirt image for Attract Mode, over a year ago. It seems to be pretty popular right now so I thought it was a perfect time to TOTALLY RUIN THE MYSTIQUE (buy my shirt)





I got the gig to draw for Attract Mode while I was working as a schoolteacher in South Korea last year. The brief as given to me by Adam Robezzoli was basically 'A cute girl playing a game boy' . I made a few sketches, but nothing that came out felt striking enough to be used on a t-shirt.













You will notice that the girl has two left feet! can you see how rusty I was

Alright, that wasn't working, so I hit upon this sort of unique way of using photo reference where I gathered a bunch of pictures and kind of Frankensteined them into a rough approximation of the image I wanted. Check this shit out:







So, lemme break down how I made this thing- firstly, the head is that of web cartoonist Liz Greenfield. I always liked this picture from Liz's myspace, and the headphones seemed pretty perfect for conveying the sense of absorption I wanted our character to have in her game.

Liz is a good lookin' lady, so her face became a partial basis for the girl in the final drawing. Awkwardly, when I got back to England I actually got introduced to Liz at a con and sort of chatted to her briefly. I briefly toyed with dropping the HURUDR I BASED A PICTURE ON YOU bomb but ultimately decided to keep it in the hangar. Needless to say, I felt (and still feel) a little creepy about this but whaddyagonnadu.










The body is actually from this picture of terrible pop star Ashlee Simpson. I always thought it was a cool pose, so I changed the angle of the head, leaned her back a bit, and removed the arms.


Although I'm very pleased with the final image, I think the lesson I learned here was that if I was ever to use photo reference again, I should probably use much more culturally neutral sources- a number of people spotted that I'd used a drawing of Ashlee Simpson as a large part of the basis of this design, and once it was out there I felt sort of bad, since I guess one's opinion of terrible pop star Ashlee Simpson could conceivably colour one's opinon of the shirt. Had I done it today I might have had more confidence in inventing a pose and outfit from scratch, but what's done is done, I guess.



Lastly, her new arms are from a photograph I got by google image searching 'woman playing gameboy', and then scrolling through the results until I got a picture that fit my collage. I put them all together and then started sketching from the image on my computer screen.











On the left's the original drawing- on the right, the same drawing after digital manipulation. During this time I used Photoshop's warp and selection tools to touch-up my inking to a very heavy extent, to the point where I could make good drawings out of bad drawings, pretty much. As you can see, on paper this was actually a terrible, terrible goopy drawing with a huge head and hardly any torso and god knows what else wrong with it, but I basically used photoshop to bend it to fit around the original photomontage it was sketched from and correct all the mistakes.

Yeah! Our character, who for reasons I cannot legally disclose I am calling Ash Greenfield, is born! 



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