Earlier this year I had the opportunity to develop a piece to be featured on the 'The Thing Artbook' released by Printed in Blood this year.
The book contains over 300 pages of artworks by artist across the world inspired and based on the all time cult-classic John Carpenter's The Thing.
The Thing is a favorite of mine, and as such I was thrilled to be part of the book but didn't know exactly what to do. I'm a monster guy, so the right decision was to pick a thing and run with it, but I had previously worked the Dog Thing in a personal paint and didn't wanted to repeat. Also I knew that both Blair Thing and Norris would be done to death, so the obvious choice was to work Palmer, but it couldn't be any Palmer, it had to be THE PALMER, and what better version of Palmer than his final form, the one that ate Windows and was barely seen on screen?
PENCILS
Decision made, it was time to start to lay down the idea. Fired up my The Thing DVD and carefully studied the frames in which Palmer finishes open his head. It's fast, but it's there, and with a lot of pauses I could set the pencils!
INKS
When the sketch was ready I printed a bigger copy of the scan. And then carefully started to lay down the inks using both Staedtler Mars-Matic 005 and 0.5.
COLORS
With the inks ready and scanned I started to digitally treat the image and add the colors and finishing touches.
All ready! After everything done was just a matter of preparing the file to be included in the book.
This project was really important to me while making it, and more so after receiving the book and seeing my piece there with all the amazing artwork by other artists.