Come Along With Me — fan art based on Adventure Time

(Though I do keep wishing for an episode where they show more of Marshall Lee)

In this blog post, I’m going to talk about my thought process for this drawing, as well as the progression from sketch to the final work. :) It’s going to be a moderately long post, but with lots of pictures and animations of my progress!

Recently, I had been missed the feeling of making fan art — learning the art style of a show and trying to keep the style while I make my own composition and add a bit of my own style as well.

I’ve been watching a lot of Adventure TIme. It’s a show that’s awesome to kick back with after a long day. Aside from the kooky storylines and subtle hints of dark humor that seeps through its candy-colored world, I actually really appreciate it for its visuals. It’s been a while since I’ve been drawn to a cartoon style, but I found Adventure Time inexplicably appealing despite its simplicity. Something about the colors and way the lines flow is just so fascinating to me.

(Wow, it’s kind of weird writing about Adventure Time as if I were doing a paper on it. Moving on!)

My favorite episodes are the ones with Marceline the Vampire Queen, so I decided to draw the gender-swapped versions of Finn and Marceline: Fionna and Marshall Lee.

Reference: Fionna model sheet

Reference: Marshall Lee model sheet

These versions make an appearance in “Fionna and Cake”, an episode in the show’s third season that features gender-swapped versions of the characters. Genderbending is such a fandom thing, something I usually only see in fan art. So I was beyond delighted when I found out they made a legit episode!

While deciding on what to draw, I just knew I wanted to include scenery from the Land of Ooo (or rather, the Land of Aaa in this case). I’m a sucker for scenery! Especially candy-colored ones. Then came the decision to draw Fionna the Human and Marshall Lee the Vampire King. With the latter being a vampire and all, it would have been uncharacteristic of him to be out in the sun.

So I imagined that maybe Fionna invited Marshall Lee to go adventuring with her during daytime, forgetting that sunlight is kiiiiinda bad for vampires. And maybe he decided to brave it out in the sun for a friend  just this once. What a nice vampire. Then came the idea to draw him with an umbrella, and an outfit that would cover up most of the exposed parts of his skin. I also wanted to keep the color of this clothes dark to emphasize how out of place he is in the blazing sunlight.

(Cake is in the drawing too. She’s hiding in Fionna’s bag because vampires freaks her out. Hahah!)

I kept Fionna’s original outfit because we hardly see Finn in different clothes. For Marshall Lee, I decided to draw him in a new one because Marceline is always changing outfits and I wanted to draw him in something apart from that red plaid shirt. The outfit I drew was inspired by Marceline’s outfit in the episode “Henchman”, Gerard Way’s outfit during Scream Awards 2008, a little bit of Dark Shadows, and the fact that a penchant for red boots seems to run in Marceline’s family. Hahah!

References for Marshall Lee’s outfit:

Gerard Way at 2008 Scream Awards (photo Credit: Albert L. Ortega / PR Photos)

Marceline's outfit in the episode "Henchman"

Now on to my artwork progress!

1.  I started with a pencil sketch on a small sketch pad. Since I planned to ink over it digitally, I decided to just take a photo rather than scan it. (For convenience more than anything, really)

2. Using a normal round brush on Photoshop, I went over my pencil sketch. I didn’t fully line Fionna at this point because I initially planned to render everything in a more painterly fashion (but decided against it later on hahah).

3. I then laid down the flat colors, all on individual layers so it’s easier to adjust if needed.

4. Added a dark grey background to check on how clean my flats are.

5. I doodled the landscape (badly) just to get the feel of where things are supposed to go.

6. I refined the doodles a bit then drew more refined outlines on a separate layer. I also added Cake at this point.

7. I hid the background doodle layer to check on the cleanliness of my lines.

8. I hid Fionna and Marshall Lee to focus on rendering the background.

9. As with my sketch for the subjects, I laid down the flats on individual layers.

10. I made Fionna and Marshall Lee visible again to see how they look with the cleaned up, colored background.

11. Added some basic shadows and a sky gradient to get the feel of how it might look after the final rendering.

12. I did some color editing (which you might find I will end up doing a lot, hahah)

13. I started adding cel shading to the pink trees on the left side.

14. I colored the black line art. The change is subtle but it makes quite a difference in the end.

15. Added cel shading on the clounds, and I changed the color of the farther hills so that there would be more focus on the foreground.

16. I refined the shadows, and changed the color of the hills yet again.

17. Finalized most of the main background cel shading, and fixed the shadow positioning so that they wouldn’t look too static.

18. Added grass detailing which actually helped a lot.

19. Not yet the final work, but almost there! I eventually decided on what I felt was the best color for the hills, and added the stripe texture on the sky (which is something I admired in Adventure Time backgrounds). A few more changes and I had the final work, which you can see on top of this blog entry!

This was so much fun to do, and I look forward to drawing more Adventure Time fan art! Thanks to all of you who read through all of this, and that perhaps you learned something! Please feel free to comment/share this post if you wish!

| (• ◡•)| (❍ᴥ❍ʋ) WHOO!