Sketch Card #13 - GODZILLA

I am now over two months behind in posting sketch cards. I'm also blowing off posting the Top 20  Card Show #17 with this post. Procrastination leads to procrastination! In my defense, I couldn't post this one earlier because most of the images were stuck on my phone. I have no excuse for the Top 20 post. This card went to Edgar. Far as I know, Edgar doesn't have a blog, and he traded me a bunch of Sparkly parallels for... uh, I don't even remember anymore it's been so long. As you can see from the back, I was a bit bewildered as to what I should draw for him . So I went with Godzilla. Good choice, no?

After playing around with the colored pencils for Twilight Starlin, Maddux Pie and Cartoon Dirk, I just went balls out with this one.  I also decided to record the process of making the thing. Here's how Gojira came to be:

First I sketched out the basic shape of Godzilla and the menacing helicopter. Once that was in place I started layering on the color, starting with some purple for a foreboding sky.

Godzilla is attacking at night, so lots of dark blue joins the fun.

Tokyo is on FIRE, so let's add some red, orange and brown.

Darkness falls. Let's add some black to finish up the sky. And over here is where a happy little helicopter lives. At least until Godzilla swats it to oblivion.

Time to grab every green pencil in the box. I started out by coloring in the outline of Godzilla and filling in with the lightest shade of green and then working progressively darker. I have no idea if this is how it should normally be done, I was pretty much winging it the whole time.

A tiny bit of darker green was added and I colored in the mouth and radioactive funk breath at this point. I think I futzed with the sky a little bit too.

A couple more layers of green were added. The big guy is filling in nicely.

Finally I added the darkest green, touched up with a few of the other colors of green, added some brown highlights here and there and did the eye. Godzilla is ready for action.

Here's the reference photo I used to make this thing. A good chunk of the stuff I've been drawing is random crap I found on the interwebs and Edgar just got lucky I stumbled across a cool monster that day. Considering some of the horrible disgusting sites I frequent, he got DAMN lucky. He could have gotten a sketch of Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid!

(why oh why can't I get away from politics???)