Charity Illustrations

Would you look at the size of that one, Doctor?

A few years ago, I had been asked by Christopher Samuel Stone if I would like to contribute some illustrations to a Doctor Who charity project that he was working on. He needed a few illustrations based on classic Who episodes, which also included the 1996 TV Movie. Here are the ones that I did. (Though sadly under-represented in my resulting batch here, are the Fifth and Sixth Doctor eras.)

All of these illustrations are vignettes in box frames. They're all done in my usual medium of acrylic gouache and ink, after which I scan them into Photoshop for clean-up and enhancement. They were a lot of fun to do, and they make me want to do more illustrations based on old episodes. (Hmmm. The wheels are turning...)

Planet of the Spiders

"Planet of the Spiders" was the last episode of Jon Pertwee's run on Doctor Who. The Third Doctor would eventually die of an overdose of radiation while on Metebelis 3 (the eponymous planet) and regenerate into Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor.

The challenge in this one was trying to make Jon Pertwee recognizable as seen from the back. I also wanted to make the Great One look more like a real spider, so I looked at a lot of spider reference. Fortunately, I'm not too arachnophobic.

...But then again, I don't live on Metebelis 3. Or Australia, for that matter. 

The Great One, a giant spider craving absolute power, wants the Metebelis crystal which the Doctor is holding. Needless to say, she does not succeed in getting it.

I usually tape the photocopied rough sketch next to the painting on the easel so I can consult it while I'm working.

I later added "sparkles" to the background of the picture, to represent more crystals in the spider's lair.

Also, I couldn't resist adding just a little bit of color for the blue Metebelis crystal.

The Second Doctor Running

The concept for this illustration was just to show "the Doctor running." It could be any incarnation, so I picked one of my favorites: Patrick Troughton.

"When I say run...RUN!"

This was inspired by Troughton's famous running scene in the serial “The Invasion,” in which he comically flees rampaging Cybermen.

I transfer my sketches onto vellum-surface bristol paper using a lightbox. I sometimes start by inking the drawing using waterproof  brush-pens; or even dark Prismacolor to trace over the pencil work. I then paint over that with acrylic gouache, working with inexpensive watercolor brushes. 

Trying to capture the scribbly energy of  my preliminary sketches can be difficult when I'm doing the finished illustration. It usually never works. I have to choose one outline as opposed to many. 

Because I couldn't find a good reference shot of the Second Doctor's shoes, I remember having to research Hush Puppies, the brand of shoes Troughton favored—specifically a pair from the mid-1960s! 

There's no color in this one at all. These days, I do like to keep color to a minimum, and usually just for highlights. Sometimes for atmospheric effects, I'll add some colored pencil or chalk to the mix. The paintings start very loose until I gradually sharpen up the line work.
                                                                      Leela

Here's Louise Jameson's fierce and cool Leela, the second of the Fourth Doctor's companions. As with the previous pictures in this batch, I chose to put the character slightly outside the frame. My idea was that the box-like frames look a bit like comic book panels. 

The jungle background here is meant to be reminiscent of the serial that introduced Leela, "The Face of Evil".

These episodes are especially notable for some brilliant dialogue by writer Chris Boucher which remains uncannily relevant even today:

"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common - they don't change their views to fit the facts. They change the facts to fit their views, which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs changing."

Once again, here's the working sketch next to the painting's progress. I go back and forth from drawing table to easel, depending on how the picture is looking. Sometimes you need to look at your work in a vertical position, standing back from it to see what needs adjusting. 

The Zarbi

Here's the First Doctor and a very early adventure. I've actually done a couple of pictures of the Web Planet, (also known as Vortis) and its various insectoid creatures. The challenge here was to try to make the Zarbi look less like people in costumes, and more like actual insects—so it was back to looking at bug reference again.  

I remember that I was working on this on New Year's Day, 2017, and I'd felt a pain in my right side while sitting at the easel. Thinking it was appendicitis, I ended up going to the emergency room that night. It would prove to be nothing serious but that had been my anxious first day of the new year as I was painting the First Doctor.

"You Zarbi are a real pain in the side, you know? Hmm?" 

Victoria and the Ice Warrior

The brief for this illustration was just "Ice Warrior" but I wanted to feature the Second Doctor's companion Victoria Waterfield as well. At that time, I hadn't done any pictures of her yet.

"EeeeeeeaaaaAAAAAAAHHH!!!!"

Victoria is a displaced Victorian woman and here is being threatened by Varga, the Martian warrior. Either that or he thinks she looks cold and just wants to offer her a nice mug of  hot cocoa.

I've joked that I should use this illustration as a Christmas card. 

I think Victoria's superpower was her ear-splitting scream. If I was that Ice Warrior, I would have covered my ears and hightailed it back to the ship.
"No cocoa for you then!"

Ace and Karra

Most of the things that blew up in the Seventh Doctor's era were probably because of companion Ace McShane and her Nitro-9. Ace, played by Sophie Aldred, became an iconic companion for many people.

In the last episodes of the classic series, she encountered the deadly Cheetah People and most notably, the fierce Kara, played by Lisa Bowerman. Kara had tried to convince Ace to follow her wildest instincts and become a Cheetah as well. 

The background in this picture is the volcanic, dying Cheetah Planet.

Once again, I wanted to make Kara look a bit more like a real cheetah and tried to give her more menacing claws.


Later on, I couldn't resist coloring Ace's eyes in yellow to show the beginning of her own transformation into a Cheetah Person.







Eighth Doctor TV Movie     
(The Enemy Within)
 

The last two illustrations in this batch were both from the Paul McGann TV Movie, sometimes known as The Enemy Within. (Of course I saved the Eighth Doctor 'til last.)

In this first picture, the newly regenerated and very confused Doctor is trying to figure out "WHO... AM...I?" and he's looking for something to wear besides a morgue sheet.

.

I admit to being very fond of the 8th Doctor, as he was everyone's continuing lifeline to Doctor Who in the so-called "Wilderness Years" when Doctor Who was not on television. Instead, there were comics, novels and many, many Big Finish audios before Russell T. Davies officially rebooted the show

This is the scene right after his somewhat terrifying regeneration from Sylvester McCoy's Seventh Doctor (still to me the scariest regeneration, with Patrick Troughton's spinning around in a void, shouting "No, no, no, no, no, no!" coming in at second.)

He's kicked the door of the morgue down with regeneration energy (I presume.)

My "Fob-Watch" Eighth
Doctor illustration. 

For almost a decade afterward, the Eighth Doctor kept the banner flying for Doctor Who in other media. And he's also one of my favorite Doctors because of that, I think.

In my opinion, he had the coolest TARDIS—all Jules Verne-steampunk and Lord Byron-gothic, full of books, statues and candelabra—and an observation ceiling above giant iron arches which opened to the vastness of space. So when I did my first version of Eight for my Fob-Watch Doctor series, I needed to get this TARDIS interior in the picture as well.

And last but not least, here's a somewhat more goofy illustration of Eight and brief companion Grace Holloway on a stolen police motorcycle racing through San Francisco on New Year's Eve, 1999.

I'm of a certain age when I remember everyone thinking the year 1999 would be so futuristic because it was the turn of the millennium. Instead, it was rather... meh.

I remember watching the TV Movie the first time that it aired on network television in the States. Plot-wise, it was a bit bonkers, but I still have fond feelings for it. 

However, we all had to wait until 2013 to finally see the Eighth Doctor regenerate into his next incarnation...


                          
...Who would become the War Doctor, played by John Hurt...

                         
                                       ...Who will be the subject of my next post.                              

                        See you then!

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. 

All the Young D'Oods

 
Let me explain.

My friend Sandra Franklin is obsessed with Oods. She loves them. So the following sketches were made for her a few years ago. I still need to properly finish them, but I also kind of like them just as sketches. 
   
For those unfamiliar with these tentacled Doctor Who aliens, here's a handy primer.  

   

   
I had shared this sketchbook drawing of a dapper Ood painter  a few years back on my Pre-Raphernalia blog. (Yes, I apologize, I haven't gotten back to Pre-Raphernalia for  awhile, either.)

And yes, that is a Judoon wearing a cravat in in the painting on the floor.

Proserpine
(the red-haired version)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti

   
   

Because we're both fans of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, here we have a Pre-Raphaelite Brother Ood. (Get it?)

He is working on a version of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's famous painting of Proserpine holding a pomegranate. Here, the 10th Doctor holds an Adipose. (Well, it's roundish and about the same size as a pomegranate.)

            

   

    

Since my friend Sandra and I are also Edgar Allan Poe fans as well (I've been known to draw few Poe cartoons here and there…) it was inevitable that I would be drawing an Edgar Allan Ood.
 
The "bust of Pallas" from the poem "The Raven" is a Time Lady, of course. And  there aren't one but two "Tell-Tale Hearts."

The  puns would continue...

       

Sandra also got a chance to show former Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies the Edgar Allan Ood drawing. 

He sees the Ood. 

He has seen the Ood. 

    The idea for this particular goofiness came about when Sandra and I were talking about how the 12th Doctor needed a band. The idea here was for it to resemble a Robert Palmer video, except with Oods. (And yes, I did try to work in a drummer, but found I sadly didn't have room.)

    Below, is the inked and painted version of this illustration.  

I can't promise this will be the end of the puns, or the Oods, but we shall see!


Coming up next: 
Some Venusian Aikido. Hai!

   

Climbing the Watcher Tree

Let's try this again, shall we?

    Well, that was a very long intermission. I've been missing in action on my own blog now for three years, and that surprises me as well. Have you ever gotten so involved with stuff that you just lose track of time?

    Well, it's like that.

    I apologize for my very long absence from updating this blog. In my last post (from 2018) I had promised you "the new stuff." Finally, we've gotten to the new stuff. And there's a lot of it to share with you.

For instance:

    In the interim, it feels like the world is a very different place than it was three years ago. One constant was that creators kept creating. My own creative projects have been mostly chronicled on my Patreon from as far back as 2016. I've sadly neglected this longer-form, more public blog... which I now hope to rectify.

    There is a lot to get caught up on, both creatively and personally. My plan for The Watcher Tree blog is to show you a lot of "making of " posts and "behind-the-scenes" moments from the past few years.  And there's a ton of content.

    As usual, I'll sometimes deviate from posting about my artwork and get into geeky ramblings, or possibly more personal things. For instance, I have a couple of pieces of a more personal nature that I had originally posted elsewhere. One future post I have planned is a longer version of an essay that I had written for a special publication, and it had been (and is still) a tough subject for me. But we'll get to that one all in good time.

    I can't promise you that I'll cover things chronologically. I do hope it will continue to be interesting for those who enjoy my work and who are curious about the process. Or what the hell was I thinking while making stuff. (Probably that I needed more coffee or that I needed to make a new playlist to work to.)

    You may have noticed that I'm a traditional artist, who likes to use pencils, ink and paints. Working this way is therapeutic for me. My Patreon is where you'll see me post about my newest projects. If you enjoy my work, please consider following me or supporting me there. This helps tremendously with things like always needed art supplies. If you choose to, Ko-Fi is another place where you can also help me acquire those elusive tubes of acrylic gouache and new watercolor brushes, which I go through very quickly. And I thank you very much for all your help.

    Other places where you can find me are on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram (which I'm admittedly still new to)  and Tumblr, where I also share current work and mostly get chatty about all sorts of other dumb stuff.

    In my last posts from 2018, I took you through a lot of older artwork I had done, mostly color fantasy paintings that I had tried to digitally restore. Now we get into new territory: art inspired by various fandoms, some for fun, some for publication. You'll see more sketchbook drawings and works-in-progress, finished illustration and my personal adventures (and misadventures.)

    Here are some photos of the balcony of my apartment. I've finally found a type of plant that can endure the blistering Phoenix, Arizona, summer: it's an African succulent called portulacaria afra, also known as "elephant bushes," because they're apparently a favorite snack for pachyderms. This has been my refuge out here for the past few months with my sketchbook, journal or Kindle (when it isn't as hot as the face of the sun, that is.)

 

    If you're already familiar with my work, what subjects would you like to see me cover here in The Watcher Tree? Are there any pictures of mine in particular that you would like to see me talk about? 

    I thank you all again in advance for your patience.

    So, let's begin. Again.

Study Time, Episode 2: Return of the Paintbrush

1996 sketches for my illustration Kirins.

In my previous post, I showed preliminary sketches for some of my older paintings, side-by-side with the finished illustrations. In this post, I will show you the next step: the color sketches done on top of photocopies. 

Finished Kirins, 1997.

   

   I still use this method after all these years.      

     
    Before I start the finished illustration, I make several letter-sized photocopies of the sketches in order to look back at while I work. (I sometimes even work out the shading on them.)

     
    Some of the copies  I use  for “coloring”— and these also help me to loosen up!

  

                                                           

   
   The “coloring” prep-study is the fun one: just like with a coloring book, I take my paints and messily play around with them on a photocopy of the sketch. Neatness is not a factor here—I'm just trying to see what colors might work for the finished picture. Sometimes I'll try several different pages of this before I get to a color scheme I like.

    The important part about this is not to start getting too detailed with the color sketch—you don't want to take that fun away when you get to the actual painting.

 


    Ghost is a painting that I would love to “restore” when I have more time. I only have it now as a picture file from a scan, and it needs quite a lot of enhancement before it can be enlarged enough to make prints. Above is the original color sketch for the painting and below is the finished painting. 

         
    Here's some more photocopied sketches that I've kept all these years, Elmer's-glued in blank books. Beside them are the finished results. 

     I mentioned my love for fauns in previous posts, and this is probably Mister Tumnus’ fault. I had plans to do as many seasonal fauns as I had done faeries, but so far have only done Spring (see this post) and this one, that I just call Pumpkins.

    Because autumn is my favorite season and full of spectacular color, I love seeing big orange pumpkins every Halloween. (Yes, and I am also one of those pumpkin spice fiends. I do have my vices.) I don't have the color sketch for this one, unfortunately. Which is also the case with this next one...

Rainforest     

    This was done when I had a pet iguana named Hugh (right), so it's no coincidence that a lot of my dragons during this time looked like iguanas. Because iguanas are vegetarians, I figured a hypothetical vegetarian dragon might be as vividly colored as a rainforest parrot, or as the flowers this particular creature eats.

    This is another picture in which my signature somehow got chopped off in the original photo I had taken of it and I needed to fit my name in there again, somewhere. (The original was sold a long time ago.) 
 
    Oh, and here’s some more photos of Hugh the Iguana. You’re welcome.

Seraph

    This began as a drawing I had done in college after wondering how anything with six wings could possibly fly. I gave my Battle Seraph some Asian-influenced armor and arranged the wings like the petals of a flower. Even in the original pen and ink picture done back in 1986 (which I don’t have anymore) I saw the wings as being red, and so in 2009 I finally did a color version. 

The sketch of the Naiad (on the left) was another potential illustration 

that never got to the painted stage.

   
    I wrote before that it’s fun to revisit old pictures and try to improve on them. An artist’s skills always get better with age—because you've accumulated years of practice, of course! (At least, this is what I keep telling myself...)

Story

    I’ve been told a few times that the boy in this picture looks like Harry Potter, but I did this picture in 1995, long before the first of J.K. Rowling’s books emerged here in the States. The idea was to have a human boy (with my cat Fish sitting in his lap) reading stories to his friend, a centaur girl, and showing her the wonder of books. 

    This painting was eventually donated it to a library back in New Jersey. I later tried to rescue and restore it from the only photo I had of it.

  

     And here's my cat Fish.  She came with that name from the animal shelter where I got her. 

    I've always had black cats. She was my second rescue and I had her as a companion for fourteen years. She and two ferrets traveled with me on the cross-country move to  Arizona.

    
    Speaking of centaurs, here’s the original color sketch for this smirking, tattooed fellow. In this case, I was in too much of a hurry to even use paints before wanting to get to the actual painting, so I grabbed some colored pencils and made this fast, messy color sketch. Voila!

    

    The actual painting was also one of the fastest I’ve ever finished as well, done on a dull Christmas day in 1997—the centaur ended up having my undivided attention and I’m still pleased with the speedy colors I’d picked for him. And I think he likes his tattoos. 

    I was also pleased with the colors I quickly picked in this picture of Caesar, which was for a bookstore co-worker. He posed for it himself. I took a reference photo of him sitting on a library cart and holding an umbrella as his sword.

Here’s the stages of my picture Sister Moon, which features three little girls with a magical winged lioness. I had an actual storybook idea for them at one point, but this was as far as it got.

    As I mentioned in the last post, this is one of the old paintings that I no longer own—so I “rescued” it from an old photograph and digitally restored bits of it. I enhanced the colors, making the moon much rounder and the stars brighter, as well as re-drawing missing pieces of it with my computer mouse!  

    

    (Did I mention I really need to get a digital tablet with an actual stylus so one day I can do things like this much better? Drawing with a mouse is like using an Etch-a-Sketch.)

The same story goes for the Merman, which I mentioned in a very early post, had vanished to parts unknown. But I managed to hold onto the preliminary sketches all these years, and once more, restored the painting from an old photograph.

   Here’s some pages of these books that I pasted the studies into. There’s even some sketches and colored versions of pictures that were in the works but, as of this blog’s date, still haven’t become paintings. However, I did start The Purple Fairy, which is in the "half-finished" painting pile along with the Keats illustration. Both are still works-in-progress that someday I'll have time to get back to!
     
   More fairies, more warrior women, more monsters… Again, ideas and sketches that never made it to the actual painting stage.

And did I mention foxes?

Here’s the progress (below) for the two Kitchen Dragon illustrations I did for my sister’s husband, Rob Lanning.

The Toaster Dragon (top) and The Sink Serpent (below).

    The Owl Watch was mostly an excuse to paint a picture of a barn owl, which is my favorite type of owl with its dark eyes, heart-shaped face and toasted marshmallow coloring.
    
    Lastly, here’s several stages of Yaira, a character from my story Heaven and the Dead City. I talked a little about the progress of this painting originally in this post.) 

    While I want to write Heaven and the Dead City as an illustrated novel now, I still have 100-plus pages of the graphic novel that I might put up on Patreon on a weekly basis so that any interested people can find it. 

    Although I began that version of the story eight years ago, it was a big learning process for me. It helped  to teach me a different, somewhat more linear painting style, and a lot of work went into it. Later in this blog, I will let you know when I start serializing it on the pages on Patreon!

                                                                                                                                   And—finally!                                                

     Now that I've shown you all this old stuff, let's bring on the new stuff. 

                                                                                                                                                                                       Coming up next!