Off and on, I've been working on this drawing of Doctor Octopus. Why? To prove a point. One of those points where you say, Oh Yeah, I Guess Jeff Was Right, only it takes you about a tenth of a second to agree with me and another tenth of a second to move onto something in your life that isn't based on pure trivia, while I pour hours and hours into this... thing.
The work has been tedious, I will freely admit. I'll never be mistaken for Doctor Octopus' biggest fan, yet even then I decided to give the guy extra arms. Why? To prove a point. Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, Doc Ock's creators, long ago proved a much stronger point: yes it's fun to give a character extra arms (see: Edgar Rice Burroughs), but if you do that, just give the fellow as few arms as is absolutely necessary to get the idea across to the audience. (If you didn't know, Stan Lee, early in his art career, was famous for drawing extra arms and legs onto his characters. He'd pick the two arms and two legs he liked best and erased the others. It's a fast and sophomoric way to render a key pose. The more experienced artist will either have the pose in his head or on a model sheet, or will use thumbnail sketches to get the key pose just right, but there's nothing wrong with Lee's method as long as you can handle lots of erasing.)
To speed things up, I based this drawing off of a picture of a Doctor Octopus toy that I found on the Internet. The Tommy guns were fun to draw, but I also traced them off of a three-dimensional virtual model provided by Tom Kranis. That way, they stayed consistent over eight iterations.
Even so, the drawing is not finished, but it's kind of cool to see how the values go from flat to shaded across the image. That's why I decided to post to JSVB today.
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