One of my favorite pieces of my own work is this drawing I did as sort of an advertisement combining two of my favorite things: Jesus and Dr. Pepper!  I wanted it to feel very much like the advertisements that used to appear in the comic books I read when I was growing up, back in the days when comics were still made on newsprint, and you could smell the alcohol in the ink on every page.  Now, if you’re not reading a digital comic, then the comics you get are printed on thick, slick, glossy pages, and the advertisements that appear are for video games, and use all sorts of digital imagery and after effects.  I wanted to do something that harkened back to hand drawn pulp advertisements, so I went into a lot of detail on the crosshatching and the inking on the Dr. Pepper bottle, which is in the foreground.  As the image recedes to the background, I decided to rely more on the colors to do the work, and gradually take the ink lines out of it, hence the color highlighting the waves of Jesus’ hair.  I also wanted to limit the color pallet to only a handful of colors – primarily those of the Dr. Pepper bottle – since that was more the style of coloring in comics going all the way up into the early 90’s.

The only two regrets I have with this piece are 1.) the fact that when I colored it, some of the ink detail got lost on the Dr. Pepper bottle, and 2.) Jesus’ shoulder is a little wonky and out of proportion.  Nonetheless, neither is something that immediately pops out at the viewer, and I feel like the good-natured joke in the piece more than compensates for the discrepancies.