A friend from our time in Michigan came to me with an intriguing image challenge. Alan has a son named Rhys. At times Rhys regales Alan with quite a few stories of his daily adventures. One of these recurring storylines is interesting because he talks about doing stuff in his monster truck.
This is cool on a couple of levels. The first is because Alan is a car guy and spends a few weekends out of the Year ripping around the track in his tuned black Mercedes.
The second is that Rhys doesn't own a monster truck. No HotWheels, no ride on electric thingy, no model.
The truck lives in Rhys's imagination. Alan gave me the honor of putting together an image from a description he recorded with Rhys. My first challenge was scale. To draw something that looked proper in scale the people were going to be small. Too small in fact and Alan saw through that dilemma when I sent him the first sketch. "Can you make us bigger??" he asked.
My solution ended up being to draw the Truck like one of those aforementioned Ride On trucks for kids. I kept the proportion of the wheels but peeled back the top of the truck and made room for Alan and Rhys. I recorded the drawing process in SketchBook Pro but when I looked at it was too long and boring. No Speed adjustment would help. I decided to "back in" to the description while erasing some layers and then synched the soundtrack the best that I could. I learned quite a bit and hope to do more like that in the future. I loved the moment Rhys mentioned the wings and Jet engine. Pure Imagination.
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