thundarr process

hey all here is more art process stuff this time a peak into the process that went into making my thundarr redesign illo. First off my thoughts on the whole concept, this illo was done as a Halloween contest between myself and a few other artists as a personal challenge. The challenge was: if I was given the task to do my version of the Saturday morning cartoon thundarr the barbarian what would I do. My idea was a more modern savage a mix of Road Warrior and Conan with some Jack Kirby styling thrown in.

I felt that Thundarr's look would have war paint similar to Conan's in the first movie but a more stylized look with a Mohawk similar to the roadwarrior villain and jack kirbys Omac. Thundarr's gear would be more of a mix of scavenged items so body armour and clothing would be a mix of football shoulder pads in a roman gladiator style with military belts and a loin cloth. Finally the Sun Sword his signature weapon (it's a light saber) so wanted to add some flair to it. I have the sword burning white hot with a flame like tip and white embers and energy bursts coming from the blade. The blade has a orange to red outer glow to help set the mood. Lastly the blade itself is a samurai sword(due to the nature of thundarr's wandering) this helps add to the fact it was stated he either found the sword or took the sword from a evil wizard it would make sense to have the blade be a non western design.

The art work process. You can see the evolution of the image going from 80's hair metal on the lower left to the final color version on the upper right. I used non repo blue pencil for the roughs and finished pencil stage. I scanned the roughs from my sketch book into photoshop and blew them up to a 11x17 size then printed them out for for clean up and finishing.

Also for the finished pencils I did them on marker paper with separate layers for the main figure and the foreground demons. I the inked this all up using micron pens,then scanned them in and did coloring in photoshop with added effect and textures.