This pic was originally penciled and inked in December 2000, making it the oldest pic I've posted to FA. It's also the most complicated one to date that I've colored.

Backstory:
Air Jordans were for a long time coveted in major urban centers, with release dates that were announced in advance, retailers recieved the shoes early, but could not sell any prior to the official release date. Enough kids skipped out on school to get theirs that Nike eventually moved the release dates to a Saturday in order to curb the hooky-play.

The Air Jordan XI (the first to feature a large proportion of patent leather) was noteworthy for always being released as a Limited Edition--fewer of these were made than any other variation of the style, and they almost always sold out on the day of release*. So it was on 12/13/00, when one of the Jordan XI releases went down as described, that I composed this piece, wherein Bastien endures adventure, peril (and at least one Raiders blooper) only to find he's too late to score a pair of shiny Jordans.

Technical
That would have been it, save for my fascination with a new (to me) method of coloring pictures--with Prismacolor pencils. I bought a 96 color set. Unfortunatley, I sucked royally at using them correctly and only made two attempts to color pics with them. The fist was re-done digitally as Substantial Makeover - Comic Edition. The other was this one. To add insult to injury, I even lost the original. Like the other color-pencil attempt, this was a photocopy of the original that I had to clean up to make workable lineart. This pic, however, I had actually started to color, doing Bastien's face and hands before I abandoned the effort.

That would have been the end of the story and this pic would have wound up in the crypt, never to be seen by anyone but me, except:

Spielberg had to go and make another Indiana Jones movie.

Well, since this pic did have an IJ theme to it, I decided to rescue it from total obscurity and renovate it for display while the movie was still playing in theatres. As with the Substantial Renovation pic, this one had to be cleaned up, corrected and colored. Nowadays I'm more experienced at digital fixer-uppers, but this pic was still a beast since it's so complex, and aside from Bastien's basic body color, I had no idea what kind of colorscheme to put the rest of the pic in. All in all, it took about 18-20 hours to clean up and color this pic. I can only imagine what it would cost if I had to pay to have this done.

Oh, by the way, this is a single layer pic. I didn't employ any stacked shade/highlight planes on this one except for the usual logo and contact info.

Brush-inked pencils (2000) restored and colored (2008) in Micrografx Picture Publisher. Full data size: 25 megabytes

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*Nowadays, Jordans don't have nearly as much cachet as they once did, what with MJ retiring and all that. In my neck of the woods, it appears that new Jordan styles are worn mostly by teen-ish girls at first, before spreading to the usual collection of fans. The Jordan XI still sells out on the day any of its iterations are released, however)

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