In the first week of August 2002 I went nuts creating Antarctic Press Annual Issue artwork submissions. I drew a submission for both the Gold Digger Annual #8 and the Ninja High School Annual #14 magazines. You can see my submission for the Ninja High School Annual #14 comic book here. For several days in a row I spent the daylight hours working feverishly in my basement office trying to create two of the best drawings I have ever done. I had actually been saving the best Britanny Diggers drawing idea I had come up with in the last year for this project- the idea that made the image you see above you!
Some months before I had come up with the funny idea of having Britanny get harassed by a love-sick male cheetah at the local zoo. Considering that Britanny is part cheetah I'm sure the pheromones she would give off would be somewhat attractive to a real cheetah. Wouldn't it be embarrassing to be just walking along minding your own business when an animal escapes from the zoo and tries to court you? If drawn in an appropriate way the drawing would be hilarious!
When the Antarctic Press Annual deadlines started creeping up on me I began the work of putting my funny idea down on paper. I wanted to make this the best Fan Art drawing of a Fred Perry character I had ever done, period. To achieve that I spared no expense in any part of the project. I took extra care when creating the drawing, and I tried extra hard to color it the best I could in the medium I am most familiar with- Crayola colored pencils. In addition, I used one of my own photographs I took of Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago to use as a background, and even digitally painted some extra effects. This drawing took me the better part of two and a half days to produce. I can say with the utmost confidence that this is the best Fred Perry fan art drawing I have ever done to date.
I was surprised in September to see the Gold Digger Annual #8 sitting in the stands at Metropolis Comics, the local comic book shop I frequent. I had a good reason to be surprised: Antarctic Press had requested that all artists who sent them artwork should include a self-addressed stamped envelope with their submission so that Antarctic Press could tell you if you got printed in the issue or not. I was expecting to see my self-addressed stamped envelope before the issue hit the stands-- instead it looks like a wasted a perfectly good stamp! As you can probably guess, I didn't get my drawing printed in the issue. I bet a lot of talented people didn't get their artwork published for Antarctic Press chose to devote half of the annual issue to finishing up the "Pink Slip" Gold Digger spin-off mini-series instead of devoting it to fan drawn artwork and stories. I was kind of upset about the annual for that reason because I thought it was the one issue a year that was supposed to be devoted to the fans- not the company's professional artists! I was also disappointed because as I stated earlier, that was by far the best Fred Perry character drawing I had ever done, and it got rejected. It will be really hard for me to ever top that drawing. Because of those two reasons it might not be such a "fun" activity to try to make a submission for next year's annual. We'll see if inspiration again hits me like it did this past year and make me change my mind.
The pencil work was done on 80lb. Strathmore meduim-surface drawing paper with a Sanford Col-Erase Non-Photo Blue pencil. I then inked the drawing with several sizes of ZiG Millenniums and Pigma Microns. It was than cleaned up, in Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7.04. I then printed it out on standard Georgia-Pacific FAX/Copy paper and colored it with Crayola colored pencils. It was than re-cleaned up, had a photo background added, and then digitally painted in Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7.04.
All text and original multimedia is © 2002 Daniel Keller. All other information is copyrighted by their respective owners.