Saturday, January 28, 2012

Caricature 24/500: The Walking Dead Part 1: Dale

I love the post-apocalyptic zombie show on AMC, The Walking Dead. I can't wait for the next season to start in a couple of weeks and I would really like to put together a decent caricature scene for it. There are lots of cool main characters (and a million varieties of undead) to choose from but for my first one I picked Dale, the RV driving, Hawaiian shirt wearing patriarch of the group of survivors the series revolves around. He's got a big hooked nose and piercing dark eyes and always seems to be mad or appalled at something. Add his salt and pepper beard and big bushy black eyebrows and you have quite a caricaturable face.


I did the main sketch with pencil and then inked it in with a fine tipped magic marker just so I could have some lines to paint around. Next I scanned it into Photoshop and broke out my new Wacom tablet to color it. 


I loosely followed the tutorial on Tom Richmond's website for digital coloring but I have been using Photoshop for a long time so am pretty familiar with the techniques. As he suggests, I just laid down a base color coat and then built up layer after layer of shading and highlighting using various opacities and colors. The pen felt pretty good in my hand and I am definitely getting used to the tablet. I know I have a lot of practice to do before I become adept but this was a decent first try. It probably took me a couple of hours to color everything in and draw the shirt pattern. I can't imagine how long it will take to fill out the Winnebago with the lawn chair on top but hopefully I will be faster by the time I get there.

2 comments:

Nancy Van Westbroek said...

Wow # 24 looks great!

Unknown said...

thanks i hope to color more of them as i get the hang of it.