his illustration was part of a series of 14 images I did for a trading card game called "ShadowFist" at the beginning of this summer. At the time I was also coloring pages for a comic series, thus getting these pieces done quickly was a priority. I had to lose some sleep, but it was a worthy and fun project. The card's description called for a classic mad scientist working on some kind of gadget in his lab, with sparks and electricity all around. Given the time constraints and keeping in mind that this piece would be printed at a very small scale, less than 3 inches, I opted for a somewhat simple approach, a few foreground elements with minimal background and one or two light sources. First thing I did, was concentrate on the description and pose a few questions, such as: what was the scientist working on? The idea of a robot came to me right away, but then I decided to go for a cyborg, since that allowed me to add a touch of gore (see the brain?) in the picture -- after all, the scientist had to look crazy! Then, I had to tackle the problem of where the sparks had to come from, and in a flash (how appropriate), I remembered a recent trip to a science museum (Cambridge, MA), where I had seen 2 huge Tesla (a mad genius of physics from the last century, regrettably under-recognized) coils produce some spectacular and loud electric sparks: I thought they would be perfect for the background. All in all, I wanted the final piece to be reminiscent of the amazing pulp magazine covers from the 40s and 50s, but with a few modern twists.

Step 1: Sketches
Having already a pretty good idea on the elements and subject of the illustration, I moved on to the sketching phase. The best time for me to sketch is at night (when normally my kids are not running around distracting me), headphones on with some kind of soothing medieval or Renaissance music. Unfortunately, the only time I had to draw a sketch for this piece, was while visiting at my in-laws (after having been dragged over there by my wife), but I had a faithful, even though low tech, 2B pencil and some papers with me. The sketch consisted of a few shapes and lines, very rough, with the goal of finding the right composition. After one failed attempt, where the image wasn't interesting enough, I made a new sketch (in about 2 minutes) and gave it a somewhat slanted angle point of view in the hope that it would add a hint of action to it. In order to avoid time consuming surprises later on, I made sure to include all the elements planned for the final image during the sketching process. Once happy with the pencil sketch, I tucked it away until a few days later, when I re-drew it on the computer by tracing its lines over using Painter and a Wacom tablet. The CG sketch was a low resolution 72 DPI image, I used the pencil tool with a small brush and 100% opacity setting over a sepia background. I always sketch at low res, so everything is faster. I did not worry about cleaning up lines or details at this point.

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MAD SCIENTIST for the ShadowFist trading card game.