Khan-Rad

This post is in honor of my good friend Paul Conrad. Paul and I met at Big Idea in 2000. Paul was the head of the Big Idea Design Studio, creating and overseeing everything print related, until he left in '05 to pursue other career choices. He eventually worked for us freelance, designing characters and things for the "Pirates Who Don't Do Anything Movie".

But back to my story... When Paul left Big Idea, we decided to give him a little going away gift. Since he is such a comic affectionado (fancy word for geek), we put him on the cover of his own comic adventure.
It started out like this - a simple sketch I did with a brush pen on paper that turned out to be too absorbent, and degraded my already questionable line quality:

Then I took the sketch into Photoshop® and colored it. This was a couple of years ago, so I have forgotten the particulars of whatever techniques I was trying to fake.

For the extremely curious, I took my inspiration from the origin cover of "Ms.Mystic".

Once I got it to this state, I took it to Veggie Design artist, John Trauscht. He put all the finishing touches on it and made it look like a real comic cover.
The reason I bring this whole story up is that Paul is once again leaving us. He recently accepted a position in the Visual Development department of a prestigious animation studio on the West Coast, in a little village known as Emeryville. I give him a hearty congratulations!

P.S. If you watch closely, you will see this cover in an upcoming episode of "3-2-1 Penguins!" this fall on NBC. There are a couple of episodes that call for Jason to be reading a comic book, so I used this art as a texture on one of them. You'll have to keep a sharp eye out though.