A Coggington Christmas Card: Work in Progress - Part 1.

Written on 14/9/14 but not posted until after I announced my Christmas card for sale.

I have started my Steampunk Coggingtons Christmas card tonight. I won't post this blog post until after I have published the card. (Edit: The finished card is now available here)
I don't know if anyone's interested to know how or why I made the decisions I did about this card, but here comes the reasoning.
Concentrate.

I've had a few ideas about the basic idea. On the one hand, I would like to show Geoffrey Coggington as a Santa-type figure. I have ideas about epic steam powered sleighs and I've got a couple of photos of outdoors in Brum from Christmas from years back to use as backdrops for this.
But also, I want to show Geoffrey as a dad figure with his family. But I have yet to cement the idea of who his family is in my own head, let alone anyone else's. I also have some photos of my own living room from last Christmas that I would quite like to get in there with that concept.

I've decided to kind of combine the Geoffrey as Santa idea with the home idea. I hope to produce different Christmas cards that explore all of these ideas at some point - maybe for this Chritsmas, maybe next.

Here's the design as it stands:

It's my living room in the background with the tones tweaked in it to make it warmer than the photo suggested. There's also a separate picture of the Christmas tree which shows it a little better and I have brought that out of the background and enlarged it to the foreground. It's still got a fair bit of its own background surrounding it.
Obviously, I drew Geoffrey in there.
I didn't know what sort of coat I wanted for him. A traditional done up Santa coat like so was my first thought:

This , though,covers up so much of his chest that only his head really shows, and I don't want him to just look like a Santa with an orange head. For the same reason, I don't want him to wear trousers. I need enough of him showing that people unfamiliar with previous Coggington cards understand what he is. However, with a short coat and no trousers and with his waist/hip area exposed, he could just look indecent. (That said, it worked for Donald Duck. I still don't get why he covers his nether regions whenever he loses his top, though. They're ALWAYS exposed!).

So then I thought about a coat more like this one: 

The problem here though, was that with the pose I'd given him, an open long coat like this just draped awkwardly and looked little like a Santa coat.

Having caught a bit of Star Trek: Generations on telly when I'd gotten in earlier today, this popped into my head as I pondered this problem:

After a bit of Googling for historical military jackets, which fitted in with my idea of G. Coggington as the captain and pilot of his sleigh, I found this which justified that style of jacket with my idea in my eyes:

After toying with the idea of him in a top hat, versus him in a Santa hat, versus him in a top hat with a Santa hat on top, I've decided, for now, to forgo the Santa hat and hope the whole scenario conveys his Santa-ness.

That decided, I've laid down the flat colours on Geoff. 

That's enough for tonight.

Bed beckons and work is peering at me from under the cover of tomorrow morning.

Part 2 is here!

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Creating my Steampunk birthday card, with Geoffrey Coggington.

So, I decided to create a birthday card.

The decisions in this card were all very simple and, to be honest, it was quite a simple card to do.
I had couple of ideas about this. I knew I wanted to use the idea of a hot air balloon being a birthday balloon but didn't know whether I wanted to have a Coggington in the balloon, or interacting with it some way else.
When Izzy suggested having him holding onto the balloon, it sounded perfect and I liked the idea of it yanking him off his feet which went on to lend itself to the caption inside of "Don't Get Carried Away!"

I began with my now standard process of starting up a Pinterest board for the card and collected ideas and references and so on.
I took a few photos outside work of the sky, and downloaded a sheet of typewriter keys:

I'm a little disappointed I used a downloadable pack for the keys. I would rather have photographed them myself but I had a time restriction because I wanted one of these ready for someone's birthday, and I didn't have time to find and photograph a typewriter. Maybe one day...

I isolated the keys I wanted and digitally cut them out from their background and arranged them, set up  my drawing space with my regular Coggington grungey frame, then laid down my photograph of tea-stained paper with a blue colour layer over the top of it for a placeholder for the sky.

Then I pencilled in the design and lay down flat colours, just to see that it worked as a concept.

It seemed good, so I refiined the pencils to 'inks', digitally.

The photo I took of the sky was good, but a little too clearly defined so I blurred it up, then to give it some interest, I added some fake bokeh effect as described in this tutorial.
I considered cutting the trees out as they were a distraction, but decided against this as they give the pic a vague point of reference and suggest it isn't happening in a vacuum.

The original photo

With some blur added

With some bokeh

 "Bokeh" is the way a camera lens renders out of focus points of light and is often considered to be aesthetically pleasing so I wanted a little here in the trees.

Then I filled in the flat colours, and the shadows which was quite fiddly around the balloon's rigging, but nothing too complicated.

I had no idea how to create the flames and the glow of them in the balloon  so I had a close look at photo references to see how the flames appear in hot air balloons and then hand drew the flames and the glow effects.



Once I'd done that, it was mostly a case of adding textures to the drawing:
There is a crinkled paper texture (that I often use from a photograph I took after screwing up, then straightening out a sheet of new A4 paper) all over but carefully masked to reduce its intensity over the key areas of the drawing.
Likewise with a tea-stained paper texture I created and often use.
There's also a rusted metal to Geoffrey Coggington in separate sections such as torso, left leg, head, foot-bottom etc. I applied the texture and warped it to vaguely fit the contours of his body. For this purpose, I didn't need to map the texture to every contour of his body.
I also applied a flat rusty metal texture over all of Geoffrey, masked it to just the 'ink' outline, and brought up it's intensity while getting rid of the actual inks. This means his outline isn't entirely solid but made just of a rusty metal image.

I popped some shadows behind the typewriter keys and fiddled with their colour levels to make them fit in with the rest of the picture and added some lens flare across Geoffrey and this card was pretty much done!

The finished card! Click to buy!

I couldn't decide whether I liked it darker or lighter so I produced both and put it to a Facebook poll.
The darker one won by quite a large margin, but I have sold a few of the lighter ones too so it would seem there's a place for both!

The card is available now in my Etsy shop: www.etsy.com/shop/capndred

-Curt-

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