Venusian Aikido

 
It's taken me years to turn this goofy sketchbook drawing into a finished illustration.

This was a sketch that I had done way back in 2014. (Has it really been seven years?) It spanned across two pages of my sketchbook. I had always meant to ink and paint it at some future time, and it took the chaos of 2020 and 2021 for me to finally get back to it. I desperately needed something ridiculous to work out my frustration on, and what better way than to have the Third Doctor kicking some Sea Devil butt? (Although I feel sorry for the poor turtle-faces.)

Jon Pertwee's Third Doctor was my first Doctor. I had encountered Doctor Who at the age of nine at my grandmother's house in southern New Jersey when our local PBS station had begun showing episodes in the afternoons. It had been the early 1970s. 

Pertwee's Doctor was more physical than his predecessors, and he had practiced a martial arts form that he called Venusian Aikido. "The Sea Devils" was the episode that introduced these titular reptilian antagonists.

    

This particular martial arts move that I gave the Doctor isn't really aikido, but rather a taekwondo roundhouse kick. Let's just say that the Doctor is quite spry for his age. 


The year's news had been relentless and my anxiety had been ramped up to eleven. I wanted something lighter, even a little goofy, to work on—because I'd been feeling too much like this poor Sea Devil in the right hand corner of this sketch, whom I've affectionately named Fred. 

I photocopied the drawing from my sketchbook in order to transfer it onto vellum bristol paper, which is my favorite paper because it takes a variety of media, everything from gouache, colored pencils, pastels and ink.

The photocopy ended up several sizes bigger than I usually work and I've since forgotten why I decided to make it so big. At any rate, I traced it using my lightbox, adjusted it a bit in pencil and...

...promptly put it aside for another couple of months to work on other projects. Again, my choice to work larger made finishing it take a bit longer. 

At this stage, it still had a long way to go. I had decided that the Third Doctor's coat needed a color, which I decided would be maroon. Once I decided that the illustration was physically finished, I photographed it so I could do my usual "clean-up" in Photoshop.  

At the time I was working on this picture, I had also taken the big step of finally ordering a Wacom tablet to better help my Photoshop enhancements. I've been using a mouse (agonizingly) all this time and I thought it was time to get better tools. Of course, I will have to play with it a lot more to get a feel for it. But I prefer working traditionally. It's therapeutic for me and I enjoy using inks, pencils and paint on paper. I use the Wacom mainly for strengthening linework from the photo scans, and for some special effects. 

Poor Fred the Sea Devil is so done with
everything right now. 

                                                 Coming up next:
                        An assortment of Doctor Who charity illustrations.