Of Gods and Turtles...

Every so often, we artists, in our groups, get bored drawing one character pin-ups and we decide to draw TWO character pin-ups to test ourselves a bit further. The below is an example of one battle in a Battle Royale (in which a large group of artists choose a character to draw and are paired up to see who can draw the better battle between said two characters--winner moves on to the next round of battles until a champion is named).

Once the word that my first round opponent's character of choice was Raphael of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, visions of Thor drinking turtle soup from a half-shell in a great hall of Asgard sprang to mind. And then I realized it would be kind of tough to draw this fight in a way that would come off as believable. And then I thought of Thor as a frog battling Raphael and decided to pass as my choice was full grown Thor as a god.

And so, I began to doodle out ideas for the battle ahead on Sketchbook Express. I ended up liking the depiction of Thor bringing down Mjolnir on Raphael on the Bifrost to the left.


And I then copied it and created a whole piece with it, filling in black areas of space, drawing in a layout for the bridge and Asgard in the background. I then printed this off for use in 4D...


Taking the print off of the computer drawing, I light boxed it and, using a blue line pencil lightly drew in the layout for my final piece. I then inked it using Faber Castle Pitt Pens, brush pens and manga pens for the gray tones...


Finally, I scanned it back into the computer and into Photoshop where I enhanced the black areas, expanded the starry night and added in Raphael's caption.

BTW, click on any of the above images for a closer look.