Swingin' Des makes a comeback in a trite "It's a Wonderful Life" parody.
This cartoon turned out to more work than expected, with 20 figures, usually there's only two or three in a Swingin' Des cartoon.
First I gathered reference, Clarence from "It's a Wonderful Life", various 60's Playboy type parties and one of the original reference sources for Swingin' Des, Sean Connery's James Bond.
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Then I tried a few different layouts for the gag. Looking up at Des and Clarence at the top of the stairs from the part level, over the shoulder on the left at the top of the stairs and over the shoulder at the railing and over the shoulder in the corners with some of the party between them. I went with the last one because of the dialogue that also needed to fit in. They were all drawn very light and very rough, so they didn't scan too well.
Next I roughed out the pencils at the full size (A4.) It was getting hard to plan out where to put all the partygoers, so they were done on different sheets of paper, same for the FG characters and the main furniture pieces. The roughs were initially drawn in non-repro blue and green then redrawn in lead pencil.
All the elements were lighboxed together and inked.
I didn't want to risk stuffing up a picture that took ages to do the linework with haphazard inkwashes, so I printed some thumb versions of the inks to test various combinations, which party characters worked shaded in, what got lost and what stood out and how to make Des and Clarence ethereal without making them see-through. I used a waterbrush pen designed for mixing watercolour pencils with an mix of water and ink to make an inkwash brush pen.
Using what I learned from the thumb washes, I shaded the full version:
Text, logos, border and dicolouration were then added in Photoshop (The final version is back up the top)
