Dalek Emperor

NaArMaMo 2008, Day 27: Dalek Emperor in Colour

Doctor Who fan art featuring the Dalek Emperor as seen in the series 1 finale, Parting of the Ways.

This is my twenty-seventh piece for this year's (Inter)National Art Making Month, in which you create a new piece of art every day in August.

After 6 hours total on the line art (4 hours on day 5 and 2 more hours on day 9), this colour job took me an additional 7 hours work today, and about 4 hours on day 9 (but I'm not counting this, as it was rectifying a technical screw up and not actual creation or art). So total drawing time on this piece is AT LEAST 13 hours!

Even though I drew this at print resolution, I've had to scale this down to 900px width because I just don't have the time to manually fix all the problems with the lines tonight. Essentially at some point on day 5, I changed the image in The Gimp and then reopened it -- this flattened the whole thing so I was drawing on an opaque white background that I couldn't colour under.

As a result of this mistake, I had to spend 4 hours fixing the lines with flood fill and then manually fixing individual pixels and even with all that when I pasted the lines back in at the end, they were full of random light pixels, which is why I've had to scale this so small and even then spent an extra 20 minutes manually drawing over the pixels still visible when scaled (and again, I'm not including that time in my total).

The other side effect of the mistake was that I had to colour over the lines so I couldn't see the guidelines any more. This made things more difficult than usual. I also wasn't able to do a more interesting background than flat black.

All in all, ARGH! But at least it's a reasonably good end result (even though, having seen more source images, it's quite clear that I screwed up the proportions when I slightly changed perspective when drawing the line art on day 5).

I imagine I'll spend some more time re-touching this later on so a higher resolution version can be uploaded.

Update August 31st: Fixed the yellow parts around the 'head' and the tank to match the metallic colour of the balls, added shadow/highlights to the struts in the left shield, and fixed the lines so this is now considerably higher resolution (at least large enough to be used as a desktop). Extra drawing time 45 minutes.

Step-by-step 'making of' image available here: [link]

Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, the Daleks or the Dalek Emperor, this is solely fan art, I do not claim any ownership of the characters or show.