Step 3: Look On The Bright Side

For as much as I whined about my writing failures in my last post, I have to admit that my illustration career is in a pretty cool place. Late last year, I was contacted by an editor for Titan Comics who had seen some of my Doctor Who pieces, and approached me to work on a variant cover for their Ninth Doctor line of Doctor Who comics.

The Tenth Doctor

The War Doctor

The images above were part of a series of illustrations I did in 2014 (I ended up drawing seven Doctors total, but I'd like to finish the set one day), and are what landed me the gig with Titan. I chose to go a traditional route ala Drew Struzan rather than a more stylized rendition for a couple of reasons: A) I wasn't sure what the art inside of the book looked like and I didn't want to mislead readers with a different style than the other artist, and B) I thought it'd be a fun exercise in realistic rendering, and I was interested in learning more about coloring tonal drawings in photoshop. The original piece was created on greyscale paper using graphite, a blending stump, and white ink and pencils, and I managed to snap a couple of progress shots along the way:

The disembodied head of Christopher Eccleston is watching you masturbate.

Fear my sonic, uh... negative space?

The issue I worked on was released yesterday, and here is the final illustration:

I googled "Christopher Eccleston Smoldering" for reference.

And of course, I had to run out and pick up my very own copy:

Actual phone conversation I had with Cale from Villainous Lair Comics: "Hi, I'd like to reserve the Shea Standefer variant cover of the Ninth Doctor comic."  "Sure, can I get your name?"  "Shea Standefer."

All in all, I'm pleased with how it turned out. I really enjoyed working on it, and the editors at Titan were wonderful and professional. I would love to collaborate on another cover with them, but I've had my nose to the grindstone working on other projects, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to carve out the time.

The most important lesson I learned in all of this was that although I'm inevitably going to run into rejection and disappointment, I can't forget all of the things that I have accomplished thus far. Having "Professional Comic Book Illustrator" as a job to fall back on really is fantastic.

So was I.