After Fifty…

Well, now Ian and I have recorded fifty episodes of Sneaky Dragon. That means I’ve drawn fifty different title cards for Sneaky Dragon. I’m not sure how it started, the idea that we should have a unique “title card” for each episode. I’m sure I was just copying what I’d seen other podcasts do – like The Ink Panthers. My original plan was to have something very simple that I could just copy off the Internet and use as a show image.

But that was not how it worked out as you’ll know if you’ve been following the show. Instead of images snatched off the Internet using good ol’ Google image search, I’ve tied myself to a desk every Saturday inserting a dragon drawing into iconic popular culture images – some of them pretty high concept and great deal of work!

Oh, that dragon! I originally thought he’d be a good idea: a simply drawn image that might have some marketing appeal – to fans of dragons. I never pictured myself drawing him every week!

The original dragon – a doodle I’d drawn in my Moleskine sketchbook – was the inspiration for the show title. It was a cute, little dragon peeping around another drawing on the page that inspired me to name him “Sneaky Dragon”.

Can you spot the original Sneaky Dragon on this page of doodles from my sketchbook? He’s pretty sneaky! (As always, click on any of the images to enlarge.)

I naively thought that original doodle would be fine for the logo design, but when I returned to the drawing I realized that what’s acceptable as a doodle in a sketchbook isn’t necessarily suitable for a finished piece. After several false starts, I drew the final dragon design on the corner of a scrap piece of paper at work one day. After a little clean up, that’s the image you can see on your iPod or in the header image on the website. (Actually, I originally drew him with arms and legs, but Ian felt it would be better with just the arms so the head could be seen more clearly, and he was right.)

Here is the original drawing of Sneaky Dragon with arms and legs:

Also there was more gore on the original Sneaky Dragon. I decided to tone down the maiden killing though.

Confession: That final drawing became my basic template for all the Sneaky Dragons I’ve drawn since. I have a couple of pieces of paper with his head at various sizes that I use to trace Sneaky Dragon onto most of the drawings I do. (If you look through the title cards, almost all of them have Sneaky Dragon drawn at the familiar three-quarter angle.)

Here’s a picture of those pieces of paper:

I tend to draw the dragon around the same size each time so there’s not a lot of variety in the sizes.

Here’s the very first title card:

So, the title cards started simply enough; the first show, which featured us talking about dragons, including Smaug, the dragon from The Hobbit, used the well-known book cover of the Hobbit with Smaug curled up on his pile of gold as the title card. I added the image of Sneaky Dragon peeking in from the corner of the picture later to make it fit in with the developing theme of the title cards.

My most embarrassing piece of art:

Like the first episode title card, the title card image for the second episode was related to topics discussed during the show. However, unlike the first title card, which used somebody else’s hard work, the title card for the second episode was a complete disaster. I learned that Photoshop isn’t magical and you can’t just throw a bunch of pictures together and it will somehow look cool. As you can see from this hodgepodge, the opposite is more likely to happen. An amateurishly cut-out image of a beaver in front of a Canadian flag? Terrible. I didn’t even use the correct font for the “Sneaky Dragon” balloon. Awful. Just an all-round failure.

The beginning of the end of my lazy scheme: the title card for the third show – the first time I’d drawn his body and not the first time I forgot that dragon’s have wings. This was a Christmas episode. I thought it would be fun to make a title card using a Coca-Cola image of Santa with Sneaky Dragon sitting in his lap. Of course, that involved drawing a whole new Sneaky Dragon. Something I was still getting used to. As you can see, three shows in and the idea of a simple image copied off the internet was already beginning to slip away from me.

Here is the original line art for the Christmas title card:

The title card for Episode 4:

I still hadn’t figured out the formula I would slavishly follow for the next 47 episodes so the title card for Episode 4 did not feature a picture of Sneaky Dragon. Instead I scanned the cover of the Frank R. Stockton collection The Lady and the Tiger and added a drawing of a shocked Tony the Tiger (this was related to the show, believe it or not).

Here’s the line art of Tony the Tiger. I ended up re-drawing his mouth and photoshopping it in because I didn’t think my original mouth made him look surprised and worried enough.

Still, once again, not exactly taking the easy route and just copying and pasting a picture of the book cover I found in Google images.

The title card for Episode 5 and the re-appearance of the dragon – where he would faithfully remain for the next 45 title cards:

Here is the line art for the Sneaky Dragon as zombie:

As you can see, Episode 5 was where I really locked into the formula: Ian and I had talked about zombies on this episode so I thought it would be funny to insert Sneaky Dragon into a photo from The Night of the Living Dead. It also tickled my fancy to have one of the zombies saying, “Sneaky Dragon!” It was at this point that I gave up on the original title cards idea and began the complicated process of the Sneaky Dragon title card – which, when you think about it, is basically creating a magazine cover illustration once a week in one and half days for about a year now. I live in fear that I will completely run out of good ideas!

One of the things I’ve learned, and probably one of the hardest for me as a perfectionist, is working with a deadline. That’s right, I’m a perfectionist – and I don’t mean that in a good way, as perfectionism is one of the most creatively destructive habits we can learn as young artists. Perfectionism leads to procrastination and depression due to hyper self-criticism and unrealistic goal setting. I’m often paralyzed into inactivity by difficult or demanding tasks that tax my abilities. You can’t be judged as a failure if you never finish, I reason.

Well, you can throw all that bullshit into a cocked hat when it comes to Sneaky Dragon. We generally record the show on a Thursday evening and the episode drops on Saturday (or Sunday morning, but as long as I haven’t gone to bed I figure I’m within the deadline). That means I have to edit the show, write the show description, upload it to the site and finish the title card on Friday evening and Saturday (fingers crossed). It really doesn’t give me too much time for hand-wringing and getting all precious.

There have been a couple of times where I’ve had to let a drawing go, admit defeat and post it anyway. Sometimes the drawing just can’t do justice to your vision, sometimes it was a bad idea in the first place and nothing was going to help it, sometimes you’re just a picky lunatic who is pleased by nothing. In the past, those things would have caused the project to come to a screeching halt. The drawings would sit on my drawing board for a couple of years while I procrastinated by doing more “important” things like folding laundry and washing dishes.

(Doing dishes and folding laundry are important chores, but you shouldn’t rather be doing them than drawing, right?)

I don’t have those luxuries with Sneaky Dragon. Every episode has to have a unique title card when it comes out and that’s all there is to it. To be honest, looking through the title cards for this post, I had a hard time finding title cards I didn’t like. They all looked pretty good to me! Here are some of the weaker ones I’ve done (in my opinion – and I don’t think they’re bad, just not successful):

Sneaky Pals – Episode 10

I’m a terrible caricaturist since I basically draw everyone looking the same and, if there was ever any doubt, this drawing  proved it. Also, I had an awful time with the colour because I hadn’t learned to reduce my huge files down to something manageable so I could create nice, compact PNG files. (I usually make my drawings 1200 pixels now unless I’m using less high quality images I’ve copied off the internet)

Episode 22

There are a couple of funny things here, but my slavish copying of the Hulk resulted in lousy drawing of Sneaky Dragon. There wasn’t a lot of room for a real drawing of him so I forgive myself.

Episode 32

Unfortunately I didn’t do a very good drawing of Sneaky Dragon here. He’s supposed to look like he’s blowing past the Addam’s Family window, but instead he looks like…I don’t know what he looks like, but he doesn’t look like he’s blowing past anyway. Too bad because it was a good idea.

Episode 39

Obviously a drawing based on the cast picture for Moonrise Kingdom, which I tried to draw in Eric Anderson’s style – a style that is difficult to mimic. I wish now that I had taken the time to colour the picture with pencil crayons, but time constraints meant I coloured it in fake watercolours on Photoshop and it’s a bit of a mess, quite frankly.

Episode 46

Once again, a good idea spoiled by sloppy execution. I should have coloured the top part of the picture red. That would have made all the difference. As it is, there is too much of the one colour. Also, I wish I’d done a bit more work on the background.

Still, out of fifty title cards, there are only six duds. That’s a pretty good hitting percentage.

Working with such tight deadlines has made me change my work habits too. I still find it irresistible to check Facebook when I first turn on the computer, but I limit what I do, and I don’t open other tabs and start a surfing party. I really have to be mean to myself and push my own nose to the grindstone.

I’ve also learned some tricks to speed up my art process. One of which I’ve already mentioned: drawing Sneaky Dragon from the same angle as often as possible so I can quickly trace his head. I also quickly learned to use tracing paper to work up a drawing to a final image. Sometimes the drawing is done with several images on different pieces of tracing paper combined to make one single image. Along with that, I’ve also started to use different colour pencils (Prismacolor Col-Erase pencils) to quickly sketch out an image and build it up using progressively darker and darker colours; then tracing and cleaning up that drawing for the final image from which I’ll ink. Here are a few photos of some of the work roughs before they’ve been cleaned up and inked:

Here’s a rough of Ian for the Episode 31 title card, in which we were chained to the word TOPIC. This was for the episode where we challenged ourselves to stick to one topic for the whole show. The topic was picked at random from listeners’ suggestions.

Here is the rough of me. I’ve pretty much accepted that I can’t draw caricatures so I just draw us in a vague, representational way that suggests us.

I wish I could have found the earlier roughs of us. They’re somewhere in the big pile of tracing paper and bristol board that makes up the Sneaky Dragon art “archives”. To save time, I drew a rough drawing and then traced both drawings from that, making some changes to differentiate us.

Here is the giant word TOPIC to which we would soon be chained:

It was much easier to do the lettering without the clutter of Ian and I in front of everything.

Here is the final composite pencil drawing, ready to be taped to the bristol board for inking:

The chains were definitely drawn on a separate piece of tracing paper and then “finished” on this drawing. You can also see that Sneaky Dragon has been added (traced from one of those head drawings, no doubt).

Here’s the final art:

I always wanted to contribute a title card to The Ink Panthers podcast, but was too shy to bother them. So when Ian was lucky enough to be a guest on the show, I jumped at the chance to draw Inky the Panther and Sneaky Dragon together.

I usually start a drawing of Sneaky Dragon with the body and add the head once I’m happy with where I’m going:

This is a very rough outline where I’m attempting to get body to look right. There is no “model sheet” for Sneaky Dragon and I tend to draw him differently depending on the situation- fat or thin, winged or no wings. I just draw until everything looks “right”.

I have a large roll of paper that my sister-in-law gave me from the printing company she worked for. I like to cut off a big piece and work up the drawings on it. Here is the rough of Inky from the same piece as the rough of Sneaky:

Yep, kids, artists really do use circles and lines like in those stupid “How to Draw a…” instruction guides.

This is someone else’s parody of them:

(Which pretty much sums up how they feel when you’re a kid.) You can also see the “URP” sound effect being formed on that paper as well. (I like to economize!)

Next, out comes the tracing paper. Here is final rough of Sneaky (sans head), the finished rough for Inky and the final rough of the URP word balloon.

Here is the composite pencils of everything put together on the paper, ready for inking:

As you can see, I traced this onto the same scrap piece of paper I started with (there’s the original rough drawing of Sneaky’s foot on the right). I added Sneaky’s head, tilted Inky’s head and added some blood.

Here’s the final art:

(Sorry if this is too much! I find these sorts of posts fascinating and wish other artists would post about their processes more so I can’t resist adding more detail. This is the last one!)

Here are some of the roughs for my most recent title card for our listeners’ questions show. Since one of the questions related to Robin (of Batman and Robin), I decided it would be amusing to have Sneaky Dragon dressed as the Riddler and Ian and I dressed as two different Robins. I got to be the Dick Grayson Robin and Ian got to be the more recent Damian Wayne Robin (because his costume is cool).

As usual, I start with a generic body that I can alter to “look” like Ian and me:

Pretty terrible, right? If you judged all your art based on what you start with you’d throw down your pencil and quit! You’ll notice I left off the hardest part: the hands!

Here’s another rough as I try to figure out Sneaky Dragon from behind and estimate where Ian and I will be standing:

Still at a rough stage, but I’ve traced the original rough and refined it a little bit. After a while, all the erasing and re-drawing becomes a drag so it’s refreshing to start over on a nice, clean sheet of paper. And then mess that up:

You can see a lot of erasing on this page too and some abortive attempts to draw the hands. I don’t know why hands are so hard to draw. I mean more than being anatomically correct, but also expressive and naturalistic.

Here’s another rough. This time of myself, but I think I was having some trouble with it so I gave up.

Here is the final pencils for me:

Look at all the erasing and re-drawing! Yeesh. I obviously struggled with these drawings.

Here is the final rough for Ian:

For some reason, Ian’s drawing went a lot smoother than mine – and I did his first.

Here is the final rough for Sneaky Dragon:

This pose makes the most sense, but now I wish I’d drawn him also looking out towards the viewer at the normal 3/4 view so we could see the front of his Riddler costume and his mask better. Oh well, hindsight is 20/20, as they say!

Finally, here are the finished pencils – basically ready for inking.

Well, it was a long way to go for a drawing that I thought was basically so-so. I kind of blew it with the inks, but that’s the way it goes. You win some, you lose some.

Here’s the final art:

Speaking of winning some, let’s end with my ten favourite title cards in no particular order:

1) First up, the title card for Episode 9, which was a take off on Winnie the Pooh stuck in Rabbit’s door. It’s so much fun to draw the Disney characters because they are so perfectly realized and the crabby looking Sneaky Dragon is pretty good too. It’s also the first time I attempted to do fake watercolours with Photoshop (on the background). Plus it’s a pretty good gag.

2) Episode 12. This one is a big favourite with Ian too. The first really ambitious title card I did. I decided to re-draw the whole cover, ink it and colouor it in Photoshop. I had no idea how long it would take and actually spent the most of the day working on it, then spent the whole night working on it and stayed up until six in the morning. It was crazy!

3) Episode 18, which featured our friend Branwyn Bigglestone. She has quite a few tattoos so as a joke I designed this impossibly silly tattoo for her. I don’t think anyone actually believed it was real, but I did get quite a few questions asking how I did it (in Photoshop with the warp tool, then I lowered the opacity a bit so my skin would show through and added some shiny highlights). The best part is the picture makes me look skinny and my arm big. Vanity!

4) Episode 15 with Y The Last Man artist Pia Guerra (and Ian’s wife) was the first episode where I could use a guest’s work  as a jumping off point for the title card. In this case, I took a pencil sketch that was in the back of one of the Y collections and added a triumphant dragon to the pile of dead men. It was quite simple, but I do like my changing the The Last Man to The Last Dragon using the same font and I also altered two of the foreground figures to look more like Ian and me – we’re even wearing Sneaky Dragon shirts.

5) Episode 19 had Richard Starkings as a guest. Another opportunity to have some fun! I really enjoy the amount of detail in this title card: Sneaky Dragon with all his futuristic gear; Elephantdragon in a rough approximation of the original font; the issue number becoming the episode number; the names of the interviewers in place of the artists; and the little Approved by the Sneaky Dragon Authority logo. Like I said: Fun!

6) Episode 26 is another title card whose sheer detail even amazes me! A reference to a riff on the show involving Macdonald’s and the plays of Shakespeare, this one must have taken me an amazing amount of time. I had to find images of the MacDonaldLand characters that I could use for reference, draw those characters and then redraw them with “Shakespeare-ian” clothing on – except Sneaky Dragon who took the role of Ronald MacDonald. My favourite is the “Small Side of  Fry Guys of Treachery”, which is a reference to Act 4, Scene 2 of Macbeth where the First Murderer says “What! You egg!” and then stabs MacDuff’s son while decrying “Young fry of treachery!” For some reason, that scene has always amused me. If you go to the Episode 26 page on the website, you’ll find a gallery of all the characters there.

7) Episode 27 makes the grade for me because it was a fun idea that I executed pretty well. Sneaky Dragon’s pose is fairly convincing since I found a picture of a girl in mid-flying kick on the internet and based the drawing around that. I also like the font, which has a funky Seventies feel. This drawing became one of our proposed T-shirt designs.

8) The title card for Episode 29 also became a possible design for a T-shirt: Sneaky Dragon in a parody of the iconic Alien image from the third movie. It was fun to work up that drawing. It was also fun to try to approximate the look of the lettering from the original poster. As much as I can, I always try to make my parodies as close as possible to the original. I really love the small D taking the place of the 3 on the poster. I’m just sorry that in my quest for authenticity I couldn’t use the phrase “In space no one can hear you sneak”, which was a paraphrase from the first film.

9) Episode 31. Our “no tangents” show. Ian and I had to stick to one subject for the whole show and it was really hard! This title card was my allegorical representation of that experience, showing Ian and I chained to the giant word TOPIC. This was the first time that I’d tackled drawing us since episode 10 and I was much happier with the results even though these drawings look nothing like us. Lately, I’ve drawn us  into a couple of title cards and I always base my portraits on this drawing. This title card was strangely popular with people as well.

10) Another labour intensive title card as I decided to re-draw Episode 40 guest Ty Templeton’s comic Stig’s Inferno with Sneaky Dragon interviewing Ty’s character Stig, who doesn’t look very happy about it. It was a lot of fun to mimic Ty’s style and I had a riot inking it in my best Templeton. The colouring is also pretty good and I think the whole thing took me quite a while to get done.

Bonus 11) I couldn’t resist adding this bit of fun. I think this drawing is amazingly witty (if I must say so myself!) (and I must!) with Pinocchio and his friend turning into Sneaky Dragons instead of donkeys. I don’t know which is worse! As usual, it’s so much fun to ink and draw in the Disney-style.

 

I’m sure I could have picked another nine and made it a Top 20, but even creeping past ten to eleven felt like cheating. The crazy part is a lot of the title cards I’ve chosen will most likely be supplanted by the title cards I’ve yet to produce for the next fifty shows. As I mentioned above, the last few title cards (for Episodes 50, 51 and 52) have all featured Ian and I in various humiliating ways (and one of those cards would definitely knock one of the ten cards I’ve chosen off the list). That may be next phase as we continue on with the show. Or I could go back to doing my usual pop culture pastiches quite easily. It will be interesting to see where the next fifty title cards take us. Whatever the case, I don’t think I’ll run out of ideas!