Well, since SotW #54 was already posted in the 200th Art Challenge thread (
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/✨⭐✨...rek”-–-with-prize.308721/page-3#post-13879907), I won't dual-post the final artwork. What I'll do instead is give a glimpse into the workflow behind my process into making it.
It all starts with an idea. As shown in the clip of the script I posted upthread, I already knew how I wanted the title page for the EVA-Trek manga to look. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the image I was thinking of where Shatner and Nimoy were holding phaser and tricorder respectively. As a substitute, I used the image of them simply posing at the camera.
Now, that left the poses in the image sorted, what about Misato and Kaji? Thankfully, I've got a fairly extensive collection of the animator reference settei for Evangelion, and lo and behold, there's one sheet where they drew Misato in
the exact pose I needed! Pretty sweet when things work out in my favor! These were my two starting points on the drawing, side-by-side:
About an hour of sketching it out, followed by tracing it over in marker for the linework later, we've got our Head of Ops completed:
Here's where I ran into trouble. The settei I've got didn't feature Kaji in the particular pose that Nimoy decided to use in the original photo so I had to think about how to proceed. I ended up using the animation references for his face almost unaltered, since Kaji would more or less be looking dead down the lens. Since he'd also be hidden behind Misato's hair if I just put him in Nimoy's exact spot, I adjusted Kaji's position in frame a little bit to compensate. So, after about another hour or so of sketching, erasing, resketching, tracing, and signing, we've got our final linework done.
The final step, which ended up taking 2-3 hours (I lost track by the end), was coloring. I was a bit nervous here because I don't typically favor color in my drawings. However, something about this drawing called out to me as it
needing to be in color, so I had to grin and bear it. The fantastic part about the new sketchbook I got this week was it really takes to colored pencils in such a smooth way that they almost look like marker by the end! My poor black pencil took the brunt of this one (am I glad I didn't put them in DS9 uniforms) thanks to Robert Blackman's designs. The easiest part to color was Misato's hair. For some reason the purple pencil in my Prismacolor set moves the smoothest and cleanest out of every pencil in the set.
And so there you have a little glimpse into how I put one of these drawings together. Now I gotta go and take a couple excedrin to quell the leftover head and back ache this gave me from hours of focusing and hunching over my drawing board.
