Bumble Bee - Commission Process 1

I'm a little late getting this posted. Our friend Chris is visiting from Canada. I met Chris (and his obsession for Power Girl) at the Pittsburgh ComicCon years ago. Turns out he has vacationed down here every year since he was young. So now we make a point of all of us getting together for dinner when he visits. :)

I have been commissioned by Vinnie to produce a painting of Bumble Bee of the Teen Titans. And he has allowed me to share with everyone as the piece progress. Let's hear it for Vinnie!

I had just finished the Tula painting for him when he threw this idea at me: Bumble Bee with a plastic honey bear filled with honey. Just two days before, I purchased one of these at the grocery store. I haven't had one of these in the house in years. That's just strange. :)

Above is my first sketched out idea for Vinnie to consider. I put this together to give him an idea of how I would work out all the elements he asked for. I also added the rest of the kitchen. He gave me the go ahead after seeing this.
From that initial sketch, I sized it up and made some modifications. You can see the differences without me going into them. The one thing that you might not notice is how it is cropped. I did the pencil sketch, scanned it and in Photoshop cropped it tighter and enlarged it. What happened is Bumble Bee and the honey bear got larger and became more of the focal point. This is similar to what I did with the Phantom Lady painting last weekend. It's always good to be open to different ways of looking at the project. I think this really helped the composition.

The top piece was done with blue Col-Erase pencil in my sketchbook. The bottom one was done with a H pencil on 11" x 17" copy paper. More tomorrow.