Big Bang Theory - Gopher Style

I mentioned in an earlier post about collaborations with McDivot art. Here's one example.

We had a background event featuring a set of TV show parodies. One of the 6 shows featured was "The Big Bang Theory". I love this show. This one parody received quite a few lovely responses on our Fairway Solitaire Facebook page. We have the BEST fans!

Here is a basic breakdown of the colab' process with one of our background artists and part of the McDivot brain-trust, Sandie Chun.

Once we tallied votes on shows we began concepts. We decided it would be funny to feature Burnie the worm as Sheldon and create a lady worm as his girlfriend Amy. McDivot and Sandy (Sandy the gopher not Sandie the artist) are playing Leonard and Penny.

Sandie did this color concept image based on a common scene in the show where the characters are gathered on their trademark sofa eating dinner.

In order to bring the characters into the common McDivot style I did a trace over on velum (yes, I still use paper and pencil).

The next step was to do the ink work. Okay... here I used Photoshop. Not real ink. I recently started using a great plug-in called Lazy Nezumi. It cleans the ends of tapered lines and smooths out any shakiness as I draw. I love it. In retrospect I couldn't recall if Sandie wanted to use these inks but it did clean things up a bit for her to take over. I didn't want to lord over either Sandie's or David's art so I let them have at it in their own preferred way and it worked out beautifully.

Then she did her final rendering. Sandie has a very keen eye for color, composition, mood and atmosphere. I've always been more of a cartoonist than painter so it was very interesting to me to see someone else's style incorporated with my sketches. This is her final painting that went into the game.

Since we have a trio of artists, Sandie Chun, David Stevenson and myself we now tag-team more frequently and the results are amazing. I will post one of David's tag-team pieces soon.