Marvin Ogrefeld, Retired Monster

I was doodling this week and this image popped into my head. I like the idea of a retired monster, reminiscing about the good old days.

For once I'm reasonably happy with the way a drawing came out.

I didn't really have much of a plan here; other than the monster and the word balloon everything was sort of ad libbed. I've been doing that a lot lately. It seems like things work out better when I throw them together at the last second instead of meticulously plan them for hours. There's probably a lesson there somewhere.

Once I drew the monster and the word balloon it just didn't look finished, so I added the colored background. Everything was on separate layers, so I adjusted the colors of each element in Photoshop until I thought it all looked right. It still felt like something was missing, so I added a layer of dirt and aging, and was finally happy with it.

The text was hand-lettered. I've been working on my lettering skills lately instead of always relying on fonts. Despite the fact that there are several million fonts out there, sometimes you just can't find one that's right.

Drawn in Photoshop on the graphic tablet.

Here's the original sketch of Marvin. Note that he's wearing glasses (glass?) here. Sometimes things that work in a sketch don't work out so well when you do the final drawing. I tried to make the glasses work, but they just got in the way of his eye, so I ended up dropping them.

His pose was a little too static (even for a retired guy), so I changed his arm so he's gesturing to bring his point home.