Santa Claus Conquers the Martians

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians

Sure, this would have been more appropriate a couple weeks back, but better late than never, I suppose.  :-)

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) was a horrible B-movie I first watched as a youngster, and have revisited again several times since.  The children of Mars are listless and bored, so a band of Martians decide to kidnap Santa and bring him to Mars so he can bring joy to their children, just like he does on Earth.

I was intending to do a B-Movie picture post of the movie, but then I got the idea of having the Martians actually be the aliens from "Mars Attacks!".  The image of a Frank Frazetta/Simon Bisley type Santa, shirtless, fighting Martians struck me as amusing and I just knew I had to do this picture.

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STEP ONE:  Here are the quick pencils for the layout of the painting.  It was done on a 9" x 12" piece of Arches (#140) watercolor paper which was glued onto a piece of hardboard with acrylic medium.

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STEP TWO:  I started doing a black and white painting with Gouache, which is an opaque watercolor.  Usually, if something gets goofed up with gouache, you can paint over top and correct any mistakes without too much trouble.  Well, this time it was giving me trouble for some reason.  So, I just sort of gave up and decided to let PhotoShop fix it, this time.

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STEP THREE:  I began reworking and filling in areas with a handy-dandy Chalk Brush in PhotoShop.  I pretty much just treated it like a continuation of the gouache painting--which it mostly was.

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STEP FOUR:  Here's the finished black-and-white part of the drawing/painting.

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STEP FIVE:  I first used a MULTIPLY Layer to layout the general colors of the picture, and then used some of the normal layers  to include highlights and atmospheric effects.

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This was done with watercolor on 9" x 12" Arches watercolor paper and PhotoShop.  

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