How the Invader Stole Christmas

I have always liked the blog posts where the artist shows step by step progression of their paintings, so I thought it was time to give both of you readers a post like that...

Let me take you all the way back to a couple of weeks ago. I got a new phone and was creating an image for the background.

(640 X 960 iPhone 4s Wallpaper. Feel free to steal it)

'twas the week before Christmas, and I had an image pop into my head. I saw Gir and Piggy pulling a grinch-like Invader Zim through the night sky delivering diabolical gifts to the greatest leaders of Earth. His hopes are that his gifts will self-unwrap on christmas eve and destroy all humans within their battery-life, preparing the earth for invasion by the Irken Armada. The image stuck with me, and I had to get it out of my head and onto paper.

The way things go, nothing ever works on the first try. Normally, I paint from an 11 X 15 Strathemore watercolor pad. I use it because it's cheap and works as well as I need it to at my level. Anyway, I put alot of distance between the characters and expected to make it look like they were high in the air, but on that size paper it made them so small it would be impossible to paint.

The next step was to forget about the depth effect and just paint it to show the characters, but that didn't tell the story I was hoping for.

Roman painted this one before I got around to taking a picture of it.

Finally, I ended up with something right in the middle, which was going to be a pain in the ass to paint, but would still give it the depth I wanted.

I'm still trying to figure out how to do this whole watercolor thing, so I like to try something new in every painting. This time around, I decided I'd go buy some inking tools and get the ink down before I splattered it with paint. I took some suggestions from two of my favorite artists, Gris Grimly and Georgia Dunn, and set to work. On Grimly's word, I used a number 4 Crowquill and Speedball black calligraphy ink for the finest of the lines. Then I followed Georgia's advice and used a Micron pen for the intermediate lines. That still didn't give me the line quality I wanted, so I invested in a Faber-Castell PITT artist brush tip pen so that I could play around a little more. There are still things I don't like about it, but for my first go it'll do.

Two days after Christmas, I had totally forgotten about this piece. It was only because I was trying to clean up the post-holiday destruction of my living room that I stumbled across my lonely monochromatic brainchild. It still took me until New Year's Day to get down to business, but Roman and I busted out the paints and we got the job done. I tried to use our DSLR to get a better picture of this, but I'm still trying to figure out how to get good digitals of this stuff. The faster I can figure it out, the faster I can start offering you guys prints and being able to set up some kind of store here in the great WWW. Anyway, there's the story of how the Invader Stole Christmas. I hope you enjoyed the show.

(How the Invader Stole Christmas, Reeves Watercolors on Strathermore Coldpress 1/1/2012)