The Next Fifty

We did it before and we can do it again!

That’s right; after our fiftieth episode I looked back at some of the title cards I’d done and gave myself a hearty pat on the back. Well, after 100 title cards it makes even more sense to give myself a big “Well done, Dave”, right?

It’s hard to believe we’ve already reached a hundred episodes and that I’ve drawn or at least mangled 100 title cards. It seems crazy because it’s something you just keep doing and one day – like today – you look back at it and you can’t believe that you have one hundred “somethings” that you made.  (I need to go lie down.)

Let me give you a quick timeline of how the podcast and title cards are done each week: We generally record the show every Thursday (barring travel or work); sometimes we record more than one show to “bank” them. (For instance, when I went to Great Britain for three weeks last year, we recorded two shows every Thursday for a month before the trip. One show went up that week and the other went into the “bank” so it could go up while I was away. I was also producing two title cards a week so that they were ready to go out with the shows. I made us really busy for a month!) Anyway, we usually record every Thursday. So, on Friday night or Saturday morning, I’ll go out to the studio (beneath the infamous deck) and start to edit the podcast. This is pretty simple – noise reduction, levelling our voices, removing pauses – then listening to the show. Usually I know by then what I’m going to draw for the title card. When I’m driving home or at the gym, with the show fresh in my mind, I’ll try to think of a striking or hopefully funny image that I can do. Often an idea pops into my head; sometimes not. Sometimes it gets pretty desperate – particularly if we “banked” a show and I can’t remember a single thing we talked about. I say this every time I write about title cards, but it often feels like you’ll never be able to come up with another title card again. I know I felt that way about Episode 98. I was sitting there thinking, “So I ran out of ideas at Episode 98.” Then I found the image of the poster for Les Mans and it was off to the races! (No pun intended, but I’ll take it.) While I’m working on the title card and listening to the show, I’ll make notes of what we talked about (for the show description) and keep my ears open for something that will make a good cold open. (That’s often my favourite part of the show.) Once the show is exported as an MP3, I upload it to the website, write the show description, tag it and post it. The show comes out every Saturday – hopefully before midnight – so it’s a lot to get done in two days as a working man and a husband and father.

I think there was a steep upgrade in my drawing skills during the first fifty title cards, but I don’t feel like I’ve made any great strides forward over the last fifty. That’s not to say I haven’t learned some more tricks or made changes. I bought a book on colouring comic books at Emerald City (Hi-Fi Color(sic) for Comics by Brian and Kristy Miller) earlier this year and it helped a lot, particularly with complicated processes like colour holds and special effects. I don’t think I could have recreated the metallic Heavy Metal-style lettering for Episode 73 without it, for example. On the other hand, it’s a more labour intensive process that has added to my drawing time, but it seems a fair trade.

Another recent development was my amazing discovery that I should take my own screen shots when no better option presented itself. I don’t know why this had never occurred to me before. I was always scouring the web, searching for images I could use for Sneaky Dragon that were large enough for a title card, but sometimes they aren’t available. I didn’t recreate the “famous” Scott Baio mural at The Fox Theatre because I wanted to. I had to because there was only one image on the entire internet and it sucked. Recently I had a great – well, I thought it was great – idea to insert Sneaky Dragon into Walter White’s place on the piece of paper left in the shrine by the two killers from the drug cartel. I was pretty certain that someone would have a screen shot of that moment. I thought it was pretty iconic with the pencil sketch of Heisenberg pinned up beside the decorated skeleton of Santa Muerte. Apparently not. I couldn’t find any images from that scene anywhere. Then I realized that I could play the episode on my computer with Netflix and take my own screenshot. It was an exciting “Eureka!” moment. I’ve done it two more times since then with the title cards for Episode 92 and Episode 96.

 

 

 

 

For me, while I’m doing a Sneaky Dragon title card, it’s all about saving time. Sometimes it’s a drag that I’m in the studio on Friday evenings or all day Saturday inserting a drawing of a dragon into stills from movies or TV shows. I have a family and there are other things in life besides Sneaky Dragon. (I think.) So here is a time-saver I recently discovered that helps a lot with complicated colouring. I used it the first time on the title card for Episode 87, which was a pastiche of the movie poster for Forbidden Planet. Often when I’m recreating an image, I’ll open it up in a smaller window in Photoshop so I can quickly sample the colours. However, with the image of the robot from Forbidden Planet, there were lots of colours and shading that I needed to reproduce that weren’t included in my inked drawing. So what I did instead is “place” the original poster image with my image to be coloured and, in effect, traced the colours from the original using the Lasso tool or just the brush. I used the same technique for the Episode 93 title card reproduction of the A Boy and His Dog poster. As you will see, the mountains and the sun were not in my original. Here is a quick overview of that process from pencils to inks to colours:

After the idea for the title card came to me while driving home, the first thing I had to do was find a good sized image of the original poster for A Boy and His Dog. Fortunately, Criterion have just released a beautiful Blu-Ray edition of the film so I quickly found a big (48 cm x 68 cm) image of the poster I could base my drawing on (i.e., trace).

Here is the original image:

What I wanted to do was pretty simple – replace Vic and Blood (the dog) with Finn and Jake from Adventure Time. It was my original plan to have Sneaky D lying at the bottom of the poster, but I realized it would be better to replace the woman with Princess Bubblegum. As usual, the ever-helpful Google Image gave some pictures of Finn and Jake to use as reference. I drew these rough images of the two characters (Jake was a lot harder to draw.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had already printed a large version of the poster onto a couple of sheets of paper that were then taped together. I used this to get drawings of Finn and Jake that would fit into the poster. I then worked up a picture of Princess Bubblegum based on the woman in the poster:

Once I had all the Adventure Time characters done, I placed a large piece of tracing paper over the film poster and traced the elements that I wanted to keep, adding Finn and Jake in place of Vic and Blood and Princess Bubblegum in place of the woman. I also added Sneaky D peeking out the open door. Here are the final pencils:

I used a ruler for most of the straight lines, but I drew the circles freehand because I didn’t have a template with large enough circles. Fortunately I was just tracing them! Here is the inked image – a combination of brush and Micron pens. I used the pens for the concentric circles, the ladder and the box around the circles – everything else was brush.

I scanned the image in several pieces then stitched them together in Photoshop. (For instructions on how to do this, please see this previous process post. The only change I’ve made is to reduce the opacity of one of the layers so I can see how the separate pieces are fitting together. I learned this trick from Hi-Fi Color(sic) for Comics.)  My images are pretty simple so I generally scan them in black and white at 600 dpi. I save the inks in bitmap mode as a TIFF file, then save that file as  a new colour file. Now this part I don’t really understand because I use a script that came on a CD with Hi-Fi Color(sic) for Comics. Somehow this script – in a series of mysterious steps – converts my bitmap file into an RGB file with the inks in a separate channel from the colours. Don’t ask me how though ’cause I don’t know!

It is a slightly more complicated process than how I used to colour. Since the colours have their own “channels” separate from the linework, I can no longer simply used the Magic Wand to select areas to colour. Using the Lasso too, I have to trace around areas I want to colour and fill in those areas before moving on. As I said it’s a bit more complicated, but I appreciate the flexibility it brings. One thing I do that I didn’t do before is sometimes place the original image into my copy to use as a colour guide. Having the inked art in a separate channel allows the original image to sit beneath the inked art. If you look at my inked version of the poster, you’ll see that there are no mountains or the giant sun. It was my plan to add these during the colouring stage and with the original movie poster in the background this was a breeze.

Here is the RGB file with the movie poster placed behind the linework:

So it turns out I suck at tracing as you can see from how out of alignment some of the elements are. You may also notice that I “erased” the line that ran along the bottom of the image through Princess Bubblegum. I decided that I didn’t like that line – even though it was in the original. With the original image in place (somewhat), using the Lasso tool or just the brush, I can add some of the background elements. You can see in this close-up detail the mountains that I quickly painted in:

Here are the colours all finished before I did the colour holds:

Colour holds are an interesting process where you can change the black linework to coloured lines. (Once again, I’m not sure how to do this since I use an action created for me by the authors of the book Hi-Fi Color (sic) for Comics.) My goal with the colour holds was to further imitate the painted look of the original poster:

As you can see, I changed the colours of the lines around the circle things, around the concentric circles and the ladder-like object, plus some of the lines of the door as in the original image.

I could have spent a couple of years searching for a similar font to the one used in the poster, but since the original poster image was so large, it was easier to take the lettering directly from it and add it to my image so that’s what I did:

After that I simply add the Sneaky Dragon speech balloon we all know and love and the title card is finished! (Probably at around three-thirty in the morning.)

There are probably very experienced Photoshop users who are chuckling (good-naturedly) at my self-taught clunkiness. I realize a lot of the things I do while I’m working are workarounds to solve problems and just make the damn drawing work. One of the most recent title cards (for Episode 99) is a good example of that. After the show, Ian and I talked about Sneaky Dragon as a Playboy cover model so I went on the internet to look at various Playboy covers to see if something popped out at me. I quickly realized that the idea of Sneaky D as a centrefold would not work graphically so then I started to think it might be fun to parody Gilbert Shelton’s Heads n’Feds board game that was included in an issue Playboy in the early 70s. (Maybe as Flagons n’Dragons?) Once again, after Googling images of the game, I realized that, short of redrawing the entire gameboard, that wasn’t going to work. However – and, oh, the straws we grasp at two in the morning – I looked at the cover of the issue that had the game and I thought, “Oo, I could replace the little Playboy bunny with Sneaky Dragon. That would be easy.”

Here’s how easy it was:

Luckily, I had that particular issue in my collection of old Playboys. because there were nothing usable in Google images. Anyway, I’m always happy when I can scan my own stuff for title cards because then I get a better resolution. (Things you take off the web are 72 dpi resolution, which is fine for the internet, but suck for anything else you might want to do.)

I scanned the cover into Photoshop and saved it as Sneaky Dragon Episode 99. Then I used the Clone/Stamp tool to “erase” the word “Playboy”. My plan was to replace the word “Playboy” with “Playdragon”. Then I had the brilliant idea of changing “Entertainment for Men” to “Entertainment for Dragons”. Fortunately, for most of the word, I could copy and paste the letters from “Entertainment for”. Only having to recreate the D and the G and stealing the S from September.

I discovered after I’d finished that I needed to move the whole thing over because it was too close to the “September”. So I moved the whole section over and filled in the missing bits with the Clone/Stamp tool. Then I found a so-so knock-off of the Playboy font, downloaded it, installed it and typed out Playdragon (after sampling the original font colour).

Here is how it looked after I finished with the lettering:

Also using the Clone/Stamp tool, I erased the Playboy bunny from the cover:

Now the easy part: I traced a silhouette of Sneaky Dragon from one of the many Sneaky Dragon images lying around, scanned that into the computer and removed the black line. Done!

Oh wait. It now occurred to me that calling the magazine Playdragon and saying that it was Entertainment for Dragons while leaving the female human model on the cover was kind of cheap. So I decided that I should add a female dragon in place of the woman. Easy right? I printed off the part of the magazine with her face, traced her eyebrows and eyes and added a snout. Then I inked it and scanned it.

Easy! Oops, nope, I had to colour the image. The green was easy, but I wanted the eyes to stand out like they do in the original image so I placed the original behind the drawing and tried to duplicate the eyes. (I did a pretty good job too.)

I also needed to trace the puzzle piece lines because the original ones would disappear once I added the dragon face. So I traced them, inked them, and scanned them.

I selected the lines using Select>Colour Range… and changed the colour from black to light brown. Then I coloured the ones along the bottom the same green as the girl dragon’s face. Done! (For now.)

Okay, once the drawings were all done and coloured. It was time to put everything together. Now you have to imagine the image in layers: there is the original image of the Playboy cover with the girl and the title changed to Playdragon; there is a layer with the female dragon; and another layer with the lines of the puzzle pieces. Obviously you can’t just place the drawing of the dragon’s face behind the hair on a different layer – that layer would cover the drawing. You have to “cut a hole” in the layer. I copied the cover as another layer, cut out the shape of the hair using a cutting path (typing this now, I realize I should have cut out all around the hair and then cut out the puzzle pieces, but I didn’t. I made it more confusing than that!) and placed that layer over the layers of the face and the puzzle piece lines.

Here is the image with the Dragongirl placed on top of the layers (You can see an outline of the puzzle pieces at the bottom of the image. I’ll explain why I did that below.):

And now the image with her under the separate layer with the original model’s face cut out.

I added a new layer with the puzzle piece lines and reduced their opacity so they blended into the image more.

Then I added some highlights to the puzzle pieces so they looked more three dimensional. I added these to the layer with the Dragongirl’s face because I didn’t want the highlights to be as translucent as the puzzle piece layer.Everything was looking good except for the bottom of the drawing sticking out.

You can see now why I should have cut out around the puzzle pieces when I was cutting out the hair line because now I had to create a new copy of the cover, place my artwork of the puzzle pieces over it, then erase along the bottom line of the pieces and delete that area so only the part beneath the puzzle pieces is covered. This actually took a long time to do and involved a lot of unnecessary futzing around. Here is how it looked with this new layer:

Finally, I added the dragon on a new layer and painted some highlights around him.

I was basically done the main part of the image, but it wouldn’t be a title card if it didn’t have the “Sneaky Dragon!” balloon. So I selected and copied some of the puzzle pieces into a new layer, turned them upside-down, made them “Sneaky Dragon Green”, and added the “Sneaky Dragon!” balloon (I have quite a selection of them) and then separated the pieces. (Which I kind of think was a mistake, but too late now!)

All done! Phew! No wonder I’m working on these things till all hours of the morning. (I was simultaneously working on the title card for Episode 100 too.)

Okay, enough of the boring process crapola let’s get to the best and worst of the last fifty title cards.

Actually I don’t think there were quite as many out and out failures as there were in the first fifty. I got more comfortable drawing – I won’t say caricatures, but cartoon substitutes for Ian and I and I really enjoyed drawing us in humiliating ways or suffering bodily injury. There were a lot more title cards that drew from topics discussed on the show rather than from pop culture references. Title cards like Episode 52 which featured Ian and I sick in bed with Sneaky D as our nurse or Episode 82 where Ian and I are Spock and Kirk respectively while Sneaky D gets a hummer from some Tribbles or Sneaky D in the midst of a rugby scrum for Episode 80. I did three different holiday title cards too. (If you want to see all the title cards, go here.)

But before we talk about the good, let’s talk about the bad.

As I said, I don’t know if there were any truly awful title cards except for the title card for Episode 75. That is a pile of pooh. I can see what I was going for: we talked about Thomas Harris and Hannibal Lector; I had the book Red Dragon; I thought making it into Green Dragon would be funny. There are some good things about it: I had to create the word Green so it looked like the same font as Dragon. I had to create the Es and make a new N, but theylook authentic. However, the drawing of Sneaky Dragon hanging from the pendulum isn’t very good. I tried it a few different ways, but I just couldn’t get it right. In the end, I give the whole thing a BLURGH. (The horrible thing is after I’d done all that work, I found a better book cover on Google images that would have been perfect! Oh well.) The other two covers that kind of bug me are the one for Episode 69 of Sneaky knocking over the Eiffel Tower and Episode 92 with Sneaky as the water alien. However, that’s more a case of missed opportunity rather than the title cards sucking. In both cases I had something more ambitious planned, but I didn’t have the time to do it.

I have posted them before, but I’ll do it again. Here is the title card for Sneaky Dragon Episode 69 on the left and the original drawing for the title card that I just didn’t have time to finish. (In my defense that was the day that I had to pick up my youngest daughter from the airport, practice my solo piece for Easter Vigil in the morning and then sing it in the evening. It was a busy day so I only feel somewhat guilty about it.)

So that brings us to my favourite title cards from the last fifty. This wasn’t an easy choice and I reserve the right to change my mind tomorrow, but for now, these are the best title cards I did in the last year. (In my opinion and in no particular order.)

Episode 51. The Dragon Who Loved Me

A parody of the poster for the James Bond film Skyfall with the Daniel Craig pose doubled then flipped for the title card. It features one of my favourite motifs: Ian and me getting injured. And it’s probably one of my favourite title cards! I really like how I drew Ian and me; I love the bullets tearing through us; and I think the inking is terrific. (Usually I wreck the drawing somewhere in the inking stage.) I think putting Sneaky D in place of the gun in the 007 logo was pretty clever as well. Thumbs up for me!

Episode 58 – It’s Adam and Eve, not Ian and Dave

I think we all know why I chose this one. Ian and I are NAKED! I used a painting I found as a template. That’s why it’s properly laid out – something I rarely do. I like my trees and the colours as well. It reminds me of a stained glass window. The strategically placed bush and Sneaky Dragon speech balloon are amusing. As is Sneaky D snaking down the tree. (There is a process post describing the creation of the title cards for Episode 51 and 58 here. In case you missed it.)

 

 

 

Episode 62 – You’re In!

During this episode  our guest Alex Robinson got into a conversation with Ian about politics in the Bizarro world. I thought it would be fun to draw Bizarro and found a cover of Adventure Comics with Superboy playing a confusing game of baseball on Bizarro World. So I turned Superboy into a confused Alex with Ian and I as the Bizarro baseball players. What I like best about this is the Adventure Comics becoming Inadvertent Comics and the inking. There is nothing like imitating those old comics with their amazing craft.

 

 

Episode 64 – It’s Scarry Out There!

This episode featured guest Ben Mills. Somehow Richard Scarry’s word books came up. If you had any sort of decent childhood, you’ll remember his books with pages and pages of everyday objects all carefully identified in a plain Times Roman font. I had wanted to use his image of a Danish castle from the book It’s A Busy, Busy World because it had a dragon in a moat, but it was a two-page image that was impossible to scan from my own copy and I could find no useful image on the web. So instead I settled on making my own busy, busy town by combining various city scenes drawn by Scarry into one busy, busy town. As an aside: I’m a big fan of Richard Scarry. He had two recognizable periods in his career as an illustrator of books for children. At first he mostly painted with gouache, I think, and then later he began to ink the pages and then colour them with a watercolour wash. (I think for efficiency’s sake.) As a child I only knew the later style, but when I started to collect Golden Books to read to my children, I found the early gouache ones more appealing. Anyway, since the later period is better known that was the style I chose to imitate. Scarry tended to ink with a plain, undifferentiated line so I imitated that with a felt pen, a Micron Pigma (probably .08), and coloured it in Photoshop with a fake watercolour look. It took me quite a while to draw and ink it and I really developed an appreciation for how hard Scarry worked on his art. In the spirit of the art, the decapitation of Sneaky D is relatively gore-free. What really makes it is the Times Roman lettering warning us to be careful crossing the street!

Episode 73 – Leaping Lizards!

This is a personal favourite of not so much for the design or the drawings, which are very closely based on a poster I found online, but because it grew out of a collaboration between my daughter and me. This was drawn for our live episode at Fan Expo – not our best live episode considering I forgot to record fifteen minutes of the show – and since Eve/Phyllis had been at the recording she kind of knew where I was heading with the title card. While I was editing the show, she opened the studio door and announced, “I got it!” I turned to her and asked, “Got what?”  “Sneakachu!” She exclaimed. Well, you just can’t argue with genius so I immediately began looking up Google images of Pikachu and found this great poster of Pikachu in different poses. The fun part was adapting Sneaky Dragon into a Pokemon style. Looking at it now, however, I should have had the bottom right-hand Sneakachu sitting on Pikachu. Oh well…

Episode 79 – Great Scott!

I think we all know why I like this title card. It has almost nothing to do with the image itself, but with the process behind creating it. Not that I don’t like the image. I think I copied the original mural pretty well (my Scott isn’t quite as skinny as the original painting) and I think I got a pretty close approximation of the painting style. I’d never even heard of the mural before it was mentioned by our guest Robert Dayton. Once he mentioned this mysterious mural of Scott Baio in a porn theatre bathroom I knew I had to make it into a title card. After my Google image search turned up one lousy photo of the mural, I briefly considered going to the theatre to take a photo of it myself but a) I didn’t have the time and b) it was in a PORN THEATRE! In the end I recreated the mural (and snuck Sneaky D into it) using drawings, a photo of a public washroom at an equestrian centre and some Photoshop magic! (There is a lengthy description of the process here.) Suffice to say that no one will ever appreciate this title card as much as I do.

Episode 87 –  Do the Robot!

I think this title card was inspired by my silly impersonation of a robot on the show. When I thought of drawing a robot, I knew right away that it would be this robot – Robbie the Robot – and the iconic image from the Forbidden Planet movie poster. As I described above, this title card was important for me because it was the first card I coloured using the original image as a template. A technique that has enabled me to do some really complicated stuff quickly enough that I can still get it finished on time. I placed the original poster image behind my colour layer and I was able to trace the colour shapes in the “space clouds” or the mountain shading, for instance, using the Lasso tool and filling in the colour. I also really like some of the little details. Like, my incorporating some of the robot machinery into Sneaky Robot’s neck and tail. I also like that the woman has one eye open, peeking at him. Another thing I do a lot, which I haven’t really talked about, is scan fonts from old Dover font books that I have and then cut and paste the letters into the words. It’s quite a complicated process, but it’s faster than searching through hundreds of fonts inconveniently hidden in a myriad of folders on my computer. This font (Amelia) is from Dan X. Solo’s great book of 70’s style display lettering, Modern Display Alphabets.

 

 

 

 

Episode 93 – Misadventure Time!

The infamous title card that didn’t get the props I thought it deserved. I still love the combination of the 1974 post-apocalyptic film with the childrens/hipsters at heart animated show. Come on, both take place in post-apocalyptic world and both feature a boy and his dog. That’s clever! I also think the original movie poster is great so it was fun to do my own version.

This was a great title card to do and very complicated as I described above. It was fun to draw Finn and Jake (Jake is harder to draw than Finn though). I really enjoyed drawing Princess Bubblegum in that pose at the bottom of the picture. Once again, I placed the original poster image on a layer behind my colour layer so I could figure out the complicated colour holds and add the mountains and sun. Rather than spend two days trying to find a suitable font for the picture, I lifted the letters from the original poster (which was a nice, big image so I could do it).

Episode 99 – I’m puzzled

Strange to include a drawing that was done so recently, but I thought this title card was particularly successful both in idea and execution. As I described above there was actually not that much drawing involved in this title card. Most of the image is just a few tweaks on the original, but the original image is so smart that I seem smart too for reproducing it. I like this image both because it turned out well and also because I seriously felt like I had no ideas for that week’s title card. The fact that my original intention was to just replace the bunny shape with Sneaky D, but then I replaced the Playboy title and the Entertainment for Men, added a female dragon and made the Sneaky Dragon speech bubble into puzzle pieces is also amusing. It’s all in the details! At least that’s what someone told me.

I can’t resist adding one more title card as a sort of honorary runner-up. That would be the title card to Episode 89 titled It’s all pun and games until someone gets hurt that is a very complicated reference to a particularly lame pun I made during that show. The title card kind of runs with the pun – parodying the movie poster with a picture that contains its own dumb joke plus, in place of a quote from a critic, is Ian’s comment about how horrible my pun was. It’s very meta and, thus, pleasing to me.

As we head into the next fifty, I kind of have an idea of what to expect. I feel like I work a particular furrow of pop culture references, but sometimes I surprise myself – the title card of Episode 101 of the Victorian street scene was certainly different. Even if I sometimes complain or get stressed out that I can’t think of a title card, I love to do them. The initial thrill of putting Sneaky D on the cover of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and feeling very clever still hasn’t left me. There are lots of things that I haven’t done: comics or books or film posters that haven’t been Sneaky-ized. I haven’t done a Tintin one or Archie; Richie Rich would be fun, as would Casper; Calvin and Hobbes or Yummy Fur – all would be fun to parody. I don’t think I’ve done a single parody of an album cover. That would be fun too! After all, the whole purpose of the podcast was for us to have fun and, as I always say, when it stops being fun, I expect to get paid.

Do you have you own favourite title cards completely different from mine? Do you think I’m too hard on myself and like that stupid Green Dragon title card? Want me to finish Sneaky D in Paris one of these days? Let me know! We love your comments.