Last commission of AC2017, this one went into overtime. Funded by  gadas on behalf of  elliotarctic on the last day of the con, about 20 minutes before the Artist Alley closure, I chose to pack up my display early and took this one to the DLCC Zoo for most of the work.

At my table, I discussed the preliminaries and sketched out a basic pose for the character, an arctic fox looking over his shoulder in an "Oh, I didn't see you there" pose. I actually did most of the pose sketch upside down for immediate feedback while the commission was being paid for, and once in the Zoo, contacted him again for final input prior to inking. Good thing too, as I had omitted a letter from the name in the pencils (I had spelled "Elliot" with a single 'L' rather than the correct double). I made a quick correction and proceeded to inks and what little color there was (an arctic fox on a white backdrop isn't way up there in terms of complexity :D ). Final processing was interrupted by convention center staff closing down the Zoo, forcing a relocation to the Westin ballroom that served as an after-hours Zoo in prior years (and the main location before the facility was placed in the convention center). Here I completed the badge, scanned it and presented it to its new owner. Lacking access to a lamination machine, I left that step up to him (he did know someone with a laminator, so I assume that part worked itself out in the end)

Technical:
The one innovation here was artistic rather than technical--not the character, but the text. Normally I'm at a loss as to the style of lettering for badges, but this year I hit upon a niche--script lettering. My table offered examples of bust-shot badges with baseball pennant-style cursive lettering for the character name. While I had no takers for this specific format, I chose to incorporate a simplified version on this badge. The color scheme was chosen by the commissioner, and I expect with practice I'll get better at these.

For display on FA, I did a bit more processing than typical for badges, in that I made a few anatomical corrections (notably his right arm/hand, and left leg/foot) of the sort that one normally spots when you aren't pressed for time (like that of an end-of-con Artist Alley shutdown :D ). I also created a "virtual lamination" visual effect by tracing a plausible trim outline and laminate border with a clip hole at the top.

The actual real-media badge may come out different from this rendition, but in light of the corrections and enhancements I made, the commissioner is also elgible to get a 300dpi file of the digitally modified badge artwork for printing as an enhanced or "working" version of the badge, and keeping the original home for safekeeping. Minus the carpet texture I pasted in just for esthetics on FA :D

I'll bet you never saw another artist write this much about a conbadge commission, eh? :D

Pencil on bristol inked with Staedler tech pens and colored with Touch Three markers. Post-scan processing via Micrografx Picture Publisher 10. Posted via mobile.