Bebop and Rocksteady

Published on August 11, 2014

Last week was all-TMNT for Sketch Dailies topics, so I whipped up this Bebop and Rocksteady artwork for Friday’s theme. It was one of several sketches featured by Sketch Dailies and ended up getting a surprising amount of love on the Twitters compared to other stuff I’ve shared.

I also shared a WIP version earlier that day:

With these drawings I was trying to think less about the accepted design of either character and more the aspects of them relative to one another that stood out to me in terms of defining shapes and personality. I’ve been inspired a lot lately by Robert Iza’s process for breaking a character down into a set of building blocks you can rearrange at will. This has helped me learn to be more adventurous with character design in general. In this case, it allowed me to reduce Bebop’s overall size in order to contrast a bit better with Rocksteady.

This is also the first time I’ve used a fantastic new Photoshop brush, the “inking master” from Marco Caradonna’s “Essentials” brushset. Once I round out its shape a little, it’s the closest I’ve come to the feel of my trusty Speedball B6 pen nib on smooth bristol. Though my inking is still a bit crude (on a good day I might call it “honest”), I think it feels much more confident than in other recent drawings of mine.