Santa Claus, The Yeti And The Really Bad Decision: Behind The Scenes

Now that my 2012 Christmas Card Slash Book is finally finished, I thought I'd post a behind the scenes look at how I made it for the three or four people out there who may be interested in long-winded explanations of mildly interesting topics.

Here we see my sketch for the cover next to the finished product. I went into much more detail than normal on this sketch for some reason. Usually my sketches are way simpler and, well, more sketchy.

I guess spending more time on the sketch paid off, as the final cover is pretty darn close.

I drew the Yeti as silhouettes on the cover because I wanted to save their big reveal for the inside.

You'll note that the title in the sketch is a bit different than the final one. I went through many, many titles before finally setting on one. Originally it was going to be called Santa Vs. The Yeti, but that seemed kind of meh to me, plus last year's card was called The Space Dweebs Vs. Space Santa, so I didn't want to use another "versus" title so soon.

After much list making and gnashing of teeth I eventually went with a title that had a The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe vibe (yikes, did I just say "vibe?").  At the last minute I changed "questionable" to "really bad." Why? I dunno, it just sounded better.

The title was created in InDesign because it's easier to handle text there than in Photoshop, plus I don't think it can set text on a curve like InDesign can.

Lastly, the cover elements like the header, price and the gold strip at the left? They're all reused from last year's book. Hey, if it ain't broke, why waste time recreating them, emirate?

Next up was the title page. Nothing much to say about it, it's just a two color line drawing. The title's reused from the cover of course, just recolored. 

That's a pretty rough sketch there, and indicative of how they usually look.

Here's a very early sketch I did to try and nail down the look of Santa and his Elves. They changed quite a bit from this first sorry attempt, thank goodness. That's Santa's Domed Complex below, which looks pretty much exactly like the final version.

Here's the model sheet I made of Santa and an Elf. I made this as a visual aid to help me draw them consistently from page to page, then promptly forgot about it and didn't find it again until the project was over. Typical.

Here's Page one, which coincidentally was the first page I worked on. When I make these cards I never draw them in order. I jump around, generally saving the harder layouts for last. Also, the longer you work on a project the better you get at drawing the characters, so the latter pages will inevitably look better than the first ones. By jumping around like this, all my pages have an overall mediocrity (heh).

We're getting right into the story here on the first page; no establishing shots of the North Pole for me! That's probably why this page is so wordy-- I had a lot of stuff to set up.

The Santataur card I did two years ago prominently featured Santa and his Elves, so I wanted to distance myself from that story and make this one look as different as possible, lest it feel like a rehash.

In the Santataur card, Santa wore his traditional red garb and lived in the typical storybook workshop. So I decided to go the opposite direction this time. This version of Santa wears a sleek racing-style jacket emblazoned with his initial and he now lives and works in a slick, high-tech environment filled with the latest in technology.

The Elves also wear similar uniforms to Santa's. The uniforms are all color coded: Santa gets to wear red because he's the boss. The Head Elf, Decapitator-Of-Foes, wears green. The rest of the (lower ranking) Elves all wear blue.

It's hard to see the computer readouts on the wall, so here's a closeup detail of them. I kind of based them on Tony Stark's heads up displays from the Iron Man and Avengers movies. They're not just gobbledegook either; I tried to make most of them actually mean something.

That's Prancer the Reindeer's image (see how old he looks?) and his vital signs at the top. Apparently he was born in 1665. I tried drawing a reindeer from memory, but quickly realized I needed to google them to see what the hell they really look like. You think you know until you sit down to draw one. 

That's an overhead map of Santa's Domed North Pole Complex underneath. It's tough to see, but the legend next to it reads:

• Main Complex (that's the large central dome. I guess that contains the living quarters)
• Hydroponics (apparently the Complex grows its own food?)
• Manufacturing (where the toys are made)
• Support (generators, heating, sewage and the like)
• Proposed (that's the dotted circle, indicating that it's not yet constructed)

Note that the map is labeled "Phase 1." Is Santa planning on branching out someday?

I drew the readouts in InDesign because it's a vector program and better suited for drawing liney, geometric things like this. Once they were drawn I imported them into Photoshop, and then used the "distort" feature to put them in perspective with the wall. 

Prancer was drawn in Photoshop of course. I added scan lines over him to help sell the idea that you're looking at a monitor and not a picture on the wall.

See that row of blue lights above the screen? My plan was to have shafts of light shining down out of them. It worked perfectly in my head, but I could not for the life of me get them to look right in reality. After screwing with them for way too long I realized they were never going to work and reluctantly dropped the idea.

Hey, don't go anywhere! There's lots more to see after the jump!