Final artwork for Al Jardine's Hurry Up Hurry Up Santa Claus drawn by Guy Gilchrist with colors by Philip A. Buck. Text is presumed to have been added by the client.
Back in August 2016, I had yet another opportunity to do some color work for Guy Gilchrist, but this project was a little big different. He was hired to do the artwork for a Christmas single by Al Jardine (Yes, THE Al Jardine! As in the The Beach Boys!) When Guy asked if I could color his artwork, my reply was a speedy, "Yes!" The final image is above. As you can see it features Al Jardine & Rudolph in an updated version of Santa's sleigh. Pretty fun, huh?!
REFERENCE!
When I'm working on the digital color art for a project that has a color palette that's already established (like the characters in VeggieTales comics) or when I'm working on a project that needs to evoke a certain style or mood (like this one,) I'll often gather together color samples & reference images into one page that I can leave open in whatever program I'm using. As you can see above, I used this reference page to narrow down the colors while getting a grasp on on what stylistic approach I wanted to use- Classic Christmas meets The Beach Boys!
The fantastic original black & white drawing by Guy Gilchrist!
Above is the original black & white drawing that Guy sent me. Isn't it great? He really knocked it out of the park! I knew right away this one would be lots of fun. Below you can see what the illustration looked like after I added color flats, shadows, highlights, light effects/haze & colored the lines. I really wanted to go with that charming old school Christmas vibe Guy was hinting at, so I used a lot of Kyle Webster's custom Photoshop brushes to get that soft yet painterly look. What a game-changer those brushes can be!
After all of that hullabaloo was accomplished, I set my sights on the meteorological aspects of the picture: SNOW! But what kind of snow?! In the grid at the bottom of this page are just two of quite a number of different versions I tried with snow. Some snow was more flakey, some more fluffy, some big & some large. These were the two I sent to Mr. Gilchrist, (along with the snowless version above,) to give him & the client plenty of options.
When coloring Mr. Jardine's hair, I noticed that in some of my reference the hair was more brown or reddish, while in other images it was more blonde. I tried to color it with a color that was in between them all. Later, I received word that the client wished for the hair color to be more blonde, so it was back into Photoshop for me! Now I can say I'm also that kind of colorist too, in a sense.
