MADness #73: The Hobbit!

Goblins, Wargs, and Dwarves… oh my! It’s a Middle-Earth Monday as we continue our journey along the paths through the Mirkwood that was my work for MAD Magazine. That trip seems short compared to the long, drawn out, padded three movie trek to the Lonely Mountain that only took one book to accomplish! This was the parody for the first of “The Hobbit” trilogy movies “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey”, written by my CLAPTRAP cohort Desmond Devlin and first appeared in MAD #522, September 2013.

Due to the odd nature of the splash with the map and overlaying insets I didn’t do the inked text boxes, nor the inserts and map as a single piece, but rather did each insert as a separate spot illustration and the map elements piecemeal, assembled the whole thing digitally, and submitted “full art” as they call it with no word boxes. MAD did the text boxes on the final, although I did it the usual way the rest of the parody. 

Des suggested the map format for the splash. He sent me a long list of possible silly names of places on the map, but I came up with a bunch of them myself. Yes, “Morning Wood” and “Six Flags over Mordor” were among my contributions… I am so proud.

There were only two times in all the years I worked for MAD that I asked to be assigned the art for a particular movie or TV show. The first was “Batman Begins”, citing my lifelong affinity for Batman and my familiarity with the character. That one I got assigned, and in fact did the art for that and all subsequent Batman movies. The other was “The Lord of the Rings”. I’m a bit of a LOTRs scholar, and in fact taught a unit on the books to my english class in high school. That one I did NOT get, the art going to Hermann Mejia. That was hard to argue, Hermann’s work is brilliant and his style was perfect for the fantasy genre.

So, I was both surprised and pleased to get the assignment for the Hobbit movies. Hermann was probably busy…

This parody also marked a fundamental shift in my process in doing this and most of my other illustration work. Up until now I had taken the layouts sent to me by MAD, printed them out on a decent 11×17 drawing paper and did all the roughs in pencil on those printouts. Then I would scan those roughs in, print them out at 200% of print size (original art size) and using a light table I would ink the panels and word boxes using a tech pen and then draw out the art more completely in pencil on the full sized bristol boards. After that I would ink the art, erase the pencil lines, scan the big boards, etc.

With this parody I decided to switch my pencil rough stage from pencil on paper to doing it digitally on the Wacom Cintiq in PhotoShop. This has several advantages. First, as natural as it feels to draw on the Cintiq there is no sense of the pencil tip’s quality and therefore no temptation to get caught up in the quality of the line. Doing the pencils digitally keeps me focused on the forms and compositions, and not the line weights. Second, it’s very easy when working digitally to move elements I’ve drawn around or change the size of them to experiment with different compositions. In pencil I’d have to erase and redraw those elements any time I wanted to make changes to what I drew… big time saver. Finally, working digitally allows me to zoom in as much as I want, which is great for working out caricature likenesses on smaller figures. I just have to be aware of how much detail I add. Anyway, the pencil roughs you see here were done digitally.

The other fundamental change I made in my process with this piece is I started INKING on the light table. Before I would tape the enlarged, printed out roughs underneath a piece of bristol board, and then use the light table to fully pencil everything on the board. After than i would turn off the light table and have a fully penciled page to ink., Starting with this parody I only penciled out elements I felt needed changing or defining, and usually the faces of important characters. Things like backgrounds, environments, and other less important elements I would not pencil out again on the board but ink via the image I saw through the light table. This was also a timesaver, although I found I sometimes needed to work both from the vague image I could see through the bristol and a second printout of the panel itself (as well as any photo reference I used for the art), just so I didn’t get confused about what I was drawing if the sketch was a little messy.

Gradually I got to trust my light table inking more and more, so I would only need to pencil out faces and big changes or adjustments. I have been using this process for the last 10 years now, but this was my first time using it.

That’s it for another miserable Monday MADness! Toon in next week with a return to the world of spies, international intrigue, and TV parodies.