Doctor Who Enemies Infographic

My previous Doctor Who Infographic (which you can see here or here) seemed to be a hit with folks on the interweb, so I thought I'd do another one, this time featuring classic enemies and monsters from the 1960s and 1970s.

When I first started drawing vector illustrations of the Doctors I established a specific cartoony style for them and utilized it here as well. The formula is basically a giant nose, big elongated head, a tiny body about half the height of the noggin, then very long skinny legs. This style lends itself well to human and most humanoid characters, but for robots and other monsters, not so much.

The Dalek was particularly troublesome. How do you apply that "head-body-legs" formula to something that has none of those? If I didn't make it cartoony enough then it would look like a normal drawing of a Dalek; but if I distorted it too far then it would look like I don't know how to draw (I've noticed that people who attempt cute versions of Star Wars characters have the same problem when they try to draw R2-D2). I went through many versions of the Dalek before I found the right proportions. I made its head as big as possible, then enlarged the eye stalk to comical proportions and then shrunk the middle "body" portion (containing the plunger and gun). I originally elongated the "skirt" or leg portion, but that didn't look right, so I compressed it, and finally came up with a version I could live with.

The Yeti was the last monster I drew, and it absolutely kicked my ass; more so than even the Dalek. The Yeti on the show had a ridiculous pear shaped body that didn't lend itself well to my cartoony style. I had a lot of trouble with its head. I scoured the internet and reference books for photos of it, but couldn't find any with a good view of it's face. After much searching I came to the conclusion that the reason I couldn't find a good photo of its face is because it didn't have one! There's just an area of black fur where its features out to be (Note: I am aware that there was a second version of the Yeti with a more defined mouth and glowing eyes, but few people-- including myself-- have seen that version. I wanted to go with the more iconic and recognizable faceless version).

I drew at least six versions of the Yeti, spending way too much time on it. Naturally the one that looked best is the last one I did, that I literally spent all of ten minutes drawing. Isn't that always the way? I'm still not 100% satisfied with the way it turned out. I'm blaming the source material.

I thought the Robot K-1 would be tough, but it turned out to be one of the easier ones. I think the easiest and quickest to draw of them all was probably the Sea Devil.

The actual layout evolved over time, ending up looking quite different from the initial version as I rearranged the characters to best fit the space. The text went through a lot of changes as well. There's always way more info than space, so you have to decide how best to describe a character in as few words as possible.

Special thanks to my pal across the pond, Ian Ledger, for providing reference photos and text corrections.

Drawn and laid out entirely in InDesign.

I usually post my sketches here on my blog, but there weren't really any to speak of this time. I sort of drew all the characters right on the screen.