Dated 05/06/2012

"Tonight on Channel Five News - a terrifying giant beast is rampaging through Rhode Island. Nobody knows quite where this colossal canine has come from, but there are rumours that he was seen bursting through the roof of a house in Spooner Street, Quahog.
"In other news, a baby with a strange head has reported the theft of a growth ray. Police say they still have no leads.
"And now sports. Ollie?..."

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He's never far away from my gallery these days, is he?

This is the fourth and final picture of my 'June 2012' batch, and it features Brian Griffin making a long overdue macro appearance. I had previously suggested a growth scenario for Brian in 2010's 'Road To The Macroverse' - and of course played with size differences in last year's animation 'Road To The Microverse' - but I thought it would be fun to see the big white doggy taking those chunky feet of his on a proper city rampage.



Of course, there's a reason why I don't often do full city rampage pictures. They're a PAIN IN THE ARSE.



Anyone familiar with the real Rhode Island might realise that the city depicted in this picture is actually a rough approximation of Providence, RI - one of the real cities on which Quahog is based. I decided it would add an extra dimension to the picture, so I worked from a few aerial photos of the city to produce this setting, albeit by no means 100% accurate. In doing so however, I pretty much tripled the workload for the picture, not only facing the usual painstaking process of drawing a detailed city but trying to stay faithful to the landmarks and layout of a real life location. If it hadn't come out quite so nicely, I'd be wondering why the hell I'd even bothered.

Furthermore, in a break from my normal method, most of this picture was drawn with a tablet rather than pencil. In attempting to keep with the Family Guy cartoon style, I wanted to give the picture a digitally inked appearance. Brian was the only thing to be drawn out on paper, after which I used Adobe Illustrator's Live Trace to ink the scanned image. Everything else was drawn in PaintShop Photo Pro and later traced in Illustrator - an awkward and time-consuming process, but it seems to have worked reasonably well.

As for Brian himself, I pretty much had to improvise on the face, given that you don't often see him looking down like this! I didn't want to break too much from his Family Guy proportions, but I did want to make him look reasonably chunky and heavy - after all, he does make for a rather fun giant.



So that's the end of my latest batch of work. Hope you like all the pics - and whilst I can't promise any more will be forthcoming for a while, I can only say: Watch this space!



RRRex