March 22nd 2013

The Gem City Comic Con is upon us again & just like every year they are holding a charity auction to benefit the Hero Initiative! I knew i had to come up with something to help this great cause so i set my geek detector to max… i heard that Peter Dinklage had been cast in the new X-Men movie & then i heard a rumor that Apocalypse was going to be the main villain. I put two & two together & had this weird idea.

Since my wife & i had been watching Game of Thrones recently & Dinklage was in that i though I’d merge the two universes to make it even more geeky.

It all starts with a sketch… Just something to get the ideas down. Him at a downward angle, holding the globe, skulls around his feet, maybe fire in the background.

Then the sketch gets a bit cleaner. I decide to define the scene a bit more. I bring in his character’s axe from Game of Thrones, move the globe to the other hand, keep the hair on even though Apocalypse is bald, add a book, some blood & a skull as a base to ground him.

After that i worked on his face until i felt it looked enough like the two character as one. This is tricky. Not only does it need to look like the actor but also a character he’s played in one particular TV show & then merge that with a fictional character that we’ve never seen in the 3D world.

This brings us to the pencils. These are done digital… but i lost that file so this is a scan of the print outs i used on my light-board. I pencil digitally in photoshop, print them out & ink on to the paper. As you can see i added some text to better sell the idea as well as a vertical background to best fill an 11×17 piece of paper.

For some reason i decided to paint this! My 2 year old son has started playing around in water colors and in turn so have I when he lets me use his… This was my first attempt & i think some of it is brilliant but it was taking forever & i always doubt myself when it comes to color so i ask for help.

Here is the final. My little wife did some magic with colored pencils & adult water colors, i provided the defining inks & it’s complete!

I hope someone enjoys this enough to give a few dollars for it. It’s for a good cause (and I’d like to think the picture isn’t half bad).