Yet another Proko challenge from July 2021:

Prompt

Do an illustration of any influencer morphing into an animal. Try to be clever! What animal would Logan Paul most likely turn into? Don’t take this too seriously, the submissions won’t necessarily be judged of technical skill and execution. More so humor, storytelling and creativity.

Medium: Any medium, traditional and digital, 2D and 3D is allowed

My entry was inspired by the Draftsmen podcast with Stan Prokopenko and Marshall Vandruff. There’s a chemistry between them, and occasionally Marshall will turn to camera to explain a point with a hawk-like gaze. That and his owlish wisdom meant he had to be a bird of prey.

I started by going back through old Proko videos featuring Marshall, looking for stills to sketch from, for facial expressions and that characteristic gaze. I did the sketches with polychromos pencil on rough paper which were later scanned, cleaned up and combined in Photoshop.

I also needed some reference for a hawk-like bird. The photos would have to show multiple angles including a head-on view. Also needed were close-ups of claws to grab Stan’s head.

The morph’s themselves relied on taking the starting image of Marshall and pushing the features gradually into the final hawk-head shape. It helped to find similarities between the two to serve as a link: the brow ridge; the slight turn of the mouth at the corners; the position of the iris as it gazes forward.

I lifted an old charcoal sketch of Stan from the archives and proceeded to do digital surgery on the top of his cranium. All that was left to do was add some rendering and lighting.

The final entry gets a very brief mention (around 15 minutes in) in the judging video with Ethan Pecker, though I think Stan’s more interested in his hair.