Why drawing a unique banner sucks!

"So it's time to create a banner." There are many ways to create them, and the most easily recognised are those that show off the cast to some degree or have a catchy logo. So I thought, easy, I already have the double-question logo, so I'll just use a good pose of Ben, Caths and Zophia, add the logo and title and be done with it, right?

If I had any good poses to do them from! OK, there are the archive strips in an insane resolution, but they're not many where they're facing the 'camera' in a neutral pose (the number of poses with Ben smirking is getting rediculous though!

So how about I use the original concept pencils and recolour them digitally?

One thing I hadn't factored, is that it when you colour in lineart with a pencil, you tend to go over the lines, rather than around them, like the digital methods, so I literally ended up selecting chunks of original pencil under variable tolerance, and then redrawing the missing pieces manually. Zophia was a be-yatch since her black lines are very similar to the black pencil used to colour in and also because of her already glowing eyes (when originally designed, I gave her a glowing red versus a glowing green.)

One thing that I have finally decided to stay consistant with is Cath's facial markings. Not so much the brown patches, as I don't feel it an issue to be too regular, but with the eye-jaw lines which real cheetahs have. I feel that adding them to her removes some of the expression from her face and appear muzzle-like. In contrast, Ben's eye-patches add a glasses-like appearance to his face and make him appear much more intelligant because of that. Zophia is a flying frog, 'nuff said.

And so the original three banners, the final product is a variation of this:

Of course, with version 3.0 of the Meiosis site design, I redesigned the logo, making this banner..obsolete! Progress is a GREAT thing indeed!