A Titan Comics Cover (Part 1): Keeping It Cosmic

Have you ever just fooled around with some of your artwork, just for fun, and accidentally gotten a professional job out of it?

This happened to me a few years ago.

Because I hadn't been updating The Watcher Tree as much as I would have liked to in the past few years, I never did get around to writing about some of my recent milestones here. (I did, however, keep everyone updated on my Patreon as it was occurring.) This was one of them and was extremely exciting to me at the time.

All of the fooling around that I mentioned pretty much started back on October 1, 2013 and I blame Peter Capaldi for it. He had just been announced as the next incarnation of Doctor Who and I was part of a group of people who had sent him a welcoming present of fan art that Christmas.

At the time, we had no idea what his costume might look like, so this was my imagined take on it. I wasn't too far off— I was going for an "older Bowie" look. And I'd always liked his hair, well... bigger. I thought that made him look less like his other famous role of Malcolm Tucker. His hair would eventually achieve proper floof status, which made me very happy.

I found myself in previously uncharted realms. I was new to showing people my fan art. Drawing Doctor Who would lead to my being able to practice new techniques and show my art more publicly online. It led to my making a lot of new friends as well.

A few months later, Peter himself sent thank you messages to all who participated in the fan art presents. He loves fan art, being an artist himself, and he even drew us little planets and Daleks on signed postcards. (I have mine framed and hanging on the wall.) He wrote to me: "Keep it cosmic!" (I wrote a squee-ing Watcher Tree blog post about it almost a decade ago.) Coincidentally, when I finally got to meet him five years later, he also told me to "keep it cosmic". (I'll definitely write about that meeting in a future blog post.)

Well, this first foray into Doctor Who fan art led to a long project. I began to draw portraits of each of the Doctors in my sketchbook, accompanied this time by little fob-watches in the corners counting down their numbering, where I could also conveniently put my signature. (I also chronicled the progress of these illustrations in earlier posts on this blog.) 

I hadn't planned at the time to do finished versions of the sketches at all. Sadly, my dad died, quite suddenly. I was still in shock over it, and I found myself at home from work for a few weeks and needing something else to occupy my mind, to make me feel less helpless. I turned to my drawing table, just to give me something to do. I ended up barely leaving it. 

As it turned out, it was the distraction that I desperately needed.

I pulled out my gouache paints and started with a finished version of my Tenth Doctor drawing. He was my friend Sandra Franklin's favorite, and she would be flying in to visit from England the following week and I wanted to try and get it done for her to see.

I finished Ten in two days, a record time for me. (The other 14 pictures to follow weren't done in such a similarly sad fervor.)

After this, I thought, well, there's all the other Doctors to do, too. Keep going. Make it your new assignment.

So, I did.

(left) This is the sign I made to greet my friend Sandra at the airport. It was done the previous night in children's markers on poster board. It got a few laughs from the other passengers arriving from Las Vegas, too.

(Photo by Sandra Franklin.) 

Doctor Who Blank Sketch Covers

Titan Comics put out special blank sketch covers of their DW titles, so I decided to have a go playing with them. I took some of my own Doctor illustrations and made little mock-up covers, using the sketch cover as a template.  

This also helped me practice using Photoshop, which I still admit to being a novice with. I had to make modifications to the original art to make it fit around the logo; this took more time than I had intended. However, once I started fooling around with them, I lost track of the hours I was hunched over my laptop, but I remember having a blast pretending these were real. 

The resolution of the type in this first experiment (right) is too small, but I just wanted to see what my Ten might look like as a cover. As with the others I played with, I had to add more sky over his head and remove the clock in the corner.

(Here's an old post which explains the clock in each of my Doctor pictures. In the case of David Tennant, he's ten o'clock, of course.) I also added the little photo of the actor to the upper corner.

I then moved on to the Third and Fourth Doctors, repeating the process in order to make the logo fit. These ones turned out much better, I think. I didn't have a template for the Third Doctor, so I just had him "guest-star" in the Twelfth Doctor's comic. (I added my own small Twelve up in the corner.) Four had his own line, so it wasn't a problem there. 

Proud of my fun, I shared my fake covers on Twitter, and people seemed to like them. 

There was a misunderstanding in which someone thought I actually had done a variant cover for Titan, and I had to explain that no, these were not real, that I was just playing around with my own artwork. Coincidentally, at the time, there was a limited comics series featuring the Third Doctor written by Paul Cornell, with art by Chris Jones, and both of these creators saw my fake covers on Twitter as well. (Superb story, by the way. I bought all of the issues, and the collected volume can be found here.)

Then, to my utter surprise, Andrew James, who was then editor of the Titan Doctor Who line, contacted me and asked if I wanted to do a variant cover for real this time. 

                                                                           !!!!

I think you know how I responded. 

He asked, "Which Doctor would you like to start with...?"

It was pretty obvious which one I would choose: it was the one who had started all of this "fooling around" for me in the first place, and had been the subject of my first ever fan art. (And yes, it had taken me this long into adulthood to actively make fan art.) 

I was both ecstatic and terrified at the same time. The result would become my first ever professional comic book cover.

And so, I began trying to come up with an idea for a possible Twelfth Doctor cover. 

                              

                                            To be continued ...