"Taking Your Punches" ("Cinderella Man")
Pencil Marks: Although my art is 'simplistic', the truth is I never just do one pass at a drawing. Sometimes it's not even the same idea twice. I'll whip something up, study it, tweak it, and redo it enough times until I'm satisfied. But every so often, and especially when movie studios switch release dates on us when we were doing this gallery, I must jump straight into my first attempt. No second thoughts, no time to nitpick if an arm is too big or a posture is all wrong. This was one of those pictures. When I say this was done on the fly, I'm not kidding!
Because seven movie studios played leapfrog with their release dates at roughly the same time, Tony and I found ourselves ahead of the game for movies coming out weeks in advance, but nothing for the Friday coming up. And we came to this revelation on that Sunday. It was down to the wire and instead of putting the burden on one person's shoulders, we decided we'd be fair and do two pictures that week - so we could both suffer.
I know it's a terrible pun. But for something rushed, I had a blast drawing it, if only to have Daryl doing his best Burgess Meredith impression ("Punch dat bum out, Rocky!") - Jake
Ink Smudges: Talk about being between a rock and a hard place. Jake summarized what followed well but I must elaborate if only to emphasis the trouble we found ourselves in.
All weekend long I had been working my arse off to get the "Herbie: Fully Loaded" pic done for the following Friday. Finally, on Sunday I submitted a nice sketch which was promptly handed off to Jake with the implicit directions I never see the thing again until it was posted on the website. All was right with the world. The picture was done on my end, and I had a week to sit around not worrying about what was next for the Summer Blockbuster Gallery. June 3rd was all taken care of.
But no sooner did Jake take the sketch off my hands than an ad for "Herbie" played on television stating the flick would debut in the end of the month. We took one look at each other with the biggest "WTF" looks on our faces and rushed to the computer to double check.
Sure enough, not only had Herbie been shuffled, but so had quite a few other flicks (such as "Batman Begins" and "War of the Worlds"). Our entire schedule was off, and we realized we had to quickly do up another pic to take its place. It was a tough couple of hours.
With this one I really didn't tweak too much around on Jake's pencils. I made Erik a tad skinnier than Jake had drawn him, with more muscle definition on his arms and torso. The way Jake drew him made it look like the guy was wearing a shirt so that had to change. Cinderella is precisely how Jake got her. And with Daryl I just added a couple of 'Tony Touches' around the head. All in all, not too bad for a quick afternoon's work, right? - Tony