It started with a sketch of a sketch.  The caped young boy with penny loafers is a character that I had developed two summers ago in my sketchbook, but I won't go into Captain Applesauce's extraordinary background here.

I wanted something for Captain Applesauce to be up against. Captain Applesauce exists in the atomic age, and I wanted a villain that would hearken back to those days of radioactive panic.  Pretty soon, the boogerbabies were born.  I look at them as the little menacing offspring of the Blob.

Next up, I blocked in a swarm of boogerbabies for Captain Applesauce to engage in epic battle with. *I cheated a bit by re-using my initial boogerbaby concept sketch for the one in the upper left.

After I'm done with the sketch, I create another layer and then go back in and redo the line work, creating various line qualities and a cleaner look to the piece.

Underneath the "lines" layer, I begin to color the figures.  I tend to use a very soft edge brush to block in a base color, and then add multiple layers of color, shadows, and highlights over the base layer.

I then turned my attention to the background boogerbabies.  I hid the layers above so I could focus on the background.  I chose a darker green to make the foreground boogerbabies stick out better, and gave the swarm some mass by throwing in some gestural highlights and shadows.

Here are all three major layers combined.

Next I came up with a autumn sky background that I thought would work well with the colors that I had already used for Captain Applesauce and the Boogerbabies.

In this stage, I like to block in general areas of text, just so I get a hint of what the ultimate layout should look like.

Once I got to this stage, I knew that I had to make it look like a vintage movie poster or comic book title page.  I chose a pretty classy looking font for "Captain Applesauce in:" and a vintage monster movie font for the rest of the title.  The green text has an inner glow layer effect.

Here is the finished version.  After all of the elements were in place, I created a lens flare effect with a low opacity white brush, and gave the text some texture by adding highlights.


Stay tuned for more adventures of Captain Applesauce.