Godzilla: King of the Monsters

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Originally this was only intended to be the design for the buttons I'll be handing out at PAX Prime this year but I may have gotten a little carried away. I wanted use a design that was somehow relevant this past year and the first Godzilla movie to be released in 10 years came to the top of the list (Kill la Kill was a close second). As a young'un I was obsessed with movies like Godzilla and Jurassic Park and was naturally excited for the version released this year. Fortunately this one didn't disappoint and in fact ended up on the extremely short list of movies I've seen multiple times in the theater.

Since the process for this ended up being a bit more involved than some of the other projects I've posted here that I might outline some of the process involved in making. I ended up in an art history class last quarter and wanted to do something inspired by Japanese woodblock printing. I checked out some books from the school library on the subject. I'm not very confident in my drawing skills so I started with some sketches to get an idea of the pose and proportions. I liked the 2014 Godzilla design although it proved to be somewhat challenging to work with. This iteration of Godzilla was really a hybrid where it looks more like a lizard than the classic Godzilla design, but more like a human than the 1998 version. As such there weren't many real world references to go off of so there was a bit of trial and error involved in this stage. Here are the few sketches that I felt turned out alright. 

These were then scanned into Photoshop where I played around with the composition to try and get an idea of the overall look. At this point I decided to go with the third pose since it felt like the most dynamic. The one issue I had was that it looked too "bearlike" so I made the head and arms smaller to help with that.

 So to sketch the For the line-art in I went back to the pencil and paper. Ideally this would have been done in Photoshop but as I mentioned before, I'm not very confident in my drawing or tablet skills. At this point I also had a good idea that I would probably want to have this piece stand on it's own rather than just using it for a button. I wanted to preserve the layering of the major components so I could rearrange the composition down the road. 

In retrospect here's where I believe things really started to deviate from the Japanese woodblock style I was going after. As it turns out, there aren't too many examples of skyscrapers or reptiles in traditional woodblock prints so without any good parallels I began to play things by ear. Although I couldn't explain why, I think it turned out looking a lot more like comic book art. I'm not sure if this was because I relied too heavily on line, didn't handle weight of line well enough or something else entirely. This is definitely something to try and improve upon if I end up trying a similar project.

From this point onward it was mostly adding color, detail and the wood texture for the printed look.

Once the buttons are printed I'll be sure to update with a quick post with how they turned out. Until then...

"Listen kid, there are two things you didn't know about the Earth. One is me. And the other is... Godzilla."