"Off the Rainbow Bridge of Asgard..." ("Thor")
I'd be lying if I didn't say I thought it was an omen. As soon as I decided to do a new year of the PSBG (and if you don't know what that stands for by now, you've really not been paying attention) an idea immediately popped in my head for "Thor". A little hokey: sure. Not much room for an elaborate background: I stand guilty as charged. But it felt right to me and most of all, it forced me to break a bad habit I was over abusing.
As most users of Photoshop know, it's easy to manipulate images. You can cut and paste and askew to your hearts content. It makes the work all the more professional. I adored it because it allowed me to go back and change a countless number of mistakes, which I made a lot of. The most helpful trick I learned was the ability to draw additional images on a separate piece of paper and how to match it up with the original. I used it very little at first. But as the years went on, my illustrations stopped being drawn on one sheet and instead composed on stacks of various pages which could only be assembled in Photoshop like a jigsaw puzzle. I came to rely this technique not only with my own work but my collaborations with Tony as well. As a result, it grew to become ridiculous and somewhere a tree was crying from all the waste I was causing.
So, with this homage to "Thor" I forced myself to keep it all on one page, if only to exercise my artistic muscle. There's still Photoshop trickery in it and I admit I went back and matched up the rocks to be identical. But if this doesn't look as polished as some of my other stuff, that's because I threw away the crutch - at least with this picture - and did it old school. - Jake