Global Conquest (or a thank you card)

So after I graduated I received many a generous gifts from family as well as family friends, and decided to show my appreciation for such great gifts with a magnificent card. I liked the idea of showing people what I could do with my new college education, and I was going to do it with global conquest, Napoleonic style. So I dressed in my best 18th century French regalia and mustered my army of faceless drones, and set out in the world to conquer.

Sketch 01

Here is the first sketch I did of the idea where my mom wanted me to quickly give her a thank you card for one of her aids that gave me a gift certificate to Costco. The idea was to show me as a world conqueror using said Costco gift certificate to purchase weapon grade plutonium (As my “to do list” shows). This was a quick idea that I wanted to develop further with the general thank you card.

Sketch 02

Trying to perfect my look as a global dictator; the right costume can be the difference between total global domination and partial global domination.

Sketch 03

More sketches perfecting my look. I based some of my ideas for these sketches off of Guy Davis's "The Marquis: Danse Macabre", using the costumes from this great graphic novel as an example for my own attire.

Sketch 04

Having picked a general look for me I moved on to designing the layout for the card.

Sketch 05

Sketches for my minions. I wanted something that was easy enough to draw and was generic enough that I could replicate a number of times without it looking like I did so. It was just the general issue costume that made the look, so I hid the face and the overall effect wasn’t damaged. The appearance of my minions was inspired by Mike Mignola’s Hellboy (hence the Lobster Johnson sketch in the top left) , Guy Davis’ B.P.R.D. (with the look of the flak jackets) , and J Scott Campbell’s Danger Girl (with my minion’s generic look based off of the Hammer Soldiers - faceless Nazi troops).

Sketch 06

Thought of adding a gas mask to them to make them look more like World War I soldiers, however, could not pick a design that I liked.

Sketch 07

Final sketch for me























Sketch 08

final sketch for faceless minions

And here’s how it all came together.

I did the illustration all in Photo shop inking and coloring it. For the horde of soldiers in the back I created one row of soldiers and duplicated them several times, not shading them to give no direction to the light, and blurring them so as nothing stood out and to produce the illusion of distance.

The writing in the "to do list" was done by Emily Loen. I created the piece of paper in Photo Shop.