Hot & Cold Running Gremlin

Wow, it's been a while since I've posted an actual illustration here at Bob Canada's BlogWorld. Time to remedy that situation!

Hey, look at that Gremlin! His emotions run hot and cold! He's of two minds about things! He can take it or leave it! He's got a one-two punch! I have no idea what I'm saying!

Sorry he looks so small here. Click and zoom in to see all the overdone detail.

This illustration took forever! I think it's because as always, last year's Xmas card took a lot out of me, and I had to take a bit of time off from drawing to recover. Then when I was finally ready to start up again, it took a while to get back into the drawing rhythm. 

I drew the figure itself fairly quickly, but the gauntlets took much longer-- hard edged mechanical stuff always does. The hardest part was the flame and ice effects. I drew them over and over and over and over until I finally got them right. I'm still not completely satisfied with them, but they'll have to do. I don't want to spend a year on one drawing.

Originally I was going to color the flaming gauntlet a dark red, and the icy one a light blue. Funny thing about that-- there's no way to make a dark red mechanical glove without it looking exactly like Hellboy's Right Hand Of Doom. Whoops! So I made both gauntlets an iron blue color to try and avoid a lawsuit. 

Here's the original notebook doodle I did of the Gremlin. Pretty rough stuff. Note the very underdeveloped and barely sketched gauntlets.

Here's a much tighter digital sketch, with much more defined mechanical gloves.

Drawn in Photoshop on the graphic tablet, on several thousand layers. OK, maybe not several thousand, but it was a lot.