Good morrow to all you wizards and/or warriors! In this edition of ye olde HWC, pull up your antique throne with Mitchloidolt and myself for a second breakfast while we shoot the sorcery about our collab. Oh, and please feel free to scoop yourself another bowl of Eye Of Newt Soup in the bubbling black crock pot cauldron.



Light Wizard Version:



Evil Wizard Version:




But first, a word about the process from Mitch, a 7th year enchanter of pen and paper:

Collaborating is great because I would normally quit drawing at around 5am and just sub whatever I had, sometimes bugging Rachel to pull it because there was just too much wrong with something to go up for voting, and that's not something I can do when I have a partner. I'm forced to show what I've come up with and then brace myself for whatever changes come that will make the drawing stronger. It's awesome mining those huge emails after sending off a pass at the design and getting good nuggets of what and why to change stuff.


I went to go see the final Harry Potter flick with my fiancee, who is a MUCH bigger HP fan than I. I've read some of the books and seen the films, but I've come to realize I'm much more of a Lordie Rings fan and delving endlessly into the kind of pickaxe cave Dwarfs were using to burrow deeper and deeper into the Balrog's digs. Having said that, golly gee boy that JK Rowling sure knows how to tie her series-spanning plot points together in amazing, unexpected and fulfilling ways in that fucker. By the time the movie was knee-deep into its fifth-action scene where The Harry Potter Experience + Two were weaving around on broomsticks like Star Wars Forest Speeders, this silly idea started to peck away inside my head. By the time we were going home fully satisfied on chunks of emo Snape and heroic Neville comeuppance, I had a pretty good picture of this design's key features and feel. Things rarely come together that quickly and when they do, it's usually best to just get the hell out of the way and let them do their bidding, holding on and hoping something good pops out the other end.

Usually when these scenes are taking shape, I see a general style I think would best be suited for bringing the idea to life, but rarely does a design take me by the collar and honk me hard on the nose, screaming "THE PERSON WHO SHOULD GIVE ME A FACE IS (artist name) AND THEM ONLY!" all the way down to the typewriter. This particular one wouldn't stop yapping about working with Mitch Loidolt (who I apparently accosted at the Threadless meetup two years ago), the fabled ARMS ARE FIGHT!er and creator of one of my favorite drawing blogs of all time. With fingers in hand, I gathered up my e-courage and sent him this word slurry collection:

Wizard’s Duel: The main look of this design would have more of a classic animation feel to it, something out of Fantasia or Sword in The Stone, with a touch of ancient looking Lord of the Rings fan art. There would be two wizards seen from their sides, facing each other on top of a cliff or in some other fantasy environment, looking not unlike they were dueling towards one another in a fighting game. Both would have their wands pulled out, and casting a spell on their long, winding, grizzled old beards. Each wizard’s beard would be alive with light and energy flowing through it and around it, and both wizard beards would be doing loops and twirls before both of them collided at the tip of each beard. The beards would meet much higher up in the air than the wizards themselves are standing. Upon meeting, the tips of both beards would assume the look and shape of two hands, and those hands would be engaged in an intense thumb war wrestling match. So from far away the scene on the shirt would look quite epic, with two wizards casting spells of giant might and energy at one another, but when you get closer you see it’s their beards under a magic spell who are having a thumb war up above to determine who will be the victor of this wizarding contest. We could make the dueling wizards reminiscent of Dumbledore and one like Gandalf, although pop culture characters are not needed for this joke to work, just the character of a traditional old-world wizard with a very long, windy beard. I’d love for both wizards to have totally different dress and styles to them to make the piece more interesting to look at, as well as different colored beards and spell energy colors that are enchanting the chin hair.

Luckily it only took Mitch a couple hours to summon a response:

This idea... is... well.. kinda :
















FLIPPIN AWESOME!!!1


I admit that was one of the longest scroll-downs of my computerized life, but I'd say it was worth the payoff :) Mitch had recently moved and needed to get his life situated before this beast could be tackled, but he assured me this was one he definitely wanted to give a good go at. Luckily that go occurred just in time for the 10k contest extension, with both of us nodding our Hobbit Heads in agreement that this was the kind of design we would happily keep glued to our person like ugly on Gollum.

Mitch sent me an opening rough shot to see if our minds were heading in the same direction:



Even at this point, Mitch had impressively nailed down the key beats of the scene, and added his own elements to the collab potion proceedings. I really liked Mitch going for a very cloudy, high above the mountaintops biblical feel to the scene. I had originally envisioned the scene on a cliff amongst a sea of bubbling lava and fire in order to light the design more dramatically from underneath, but in the end Mitch managed to achieve that look as well. I also liked Mitch's straight forward take on the white/black, good versus evil wizard attire that would easily delineate sides, as well as add to that Sorcerer's Apprentice feel we wanted this piece to be injected with liberal doses of.

The only other note I could think to give Mitch was to make sure the beards twirled and looped around one another a bit more before emerging at the top during an intense turning point in the thumb wrestling war. Now that the scene was literally set for the drawing flurry to commence, Mitch wrote to me about how he'd like to tackle his part of the collab puzzle so we could make this as good as possible before the 10k deadline:

I'm going to try and crank this thing out. What I usually do is draw a thing all in one go and sub it at like 3am. What's going to be great this time is I won't be able to do that, I'll have to actually show it to someone else before it goes up. So I'm going to go ahead and do like a finished version, hopefully tonight in one long stretch of drawing, and then email it to you when it's done, with a few color options ~ and then you, without holding back obviously, can look at what's been done and make whatever changes. Even if it looks like I spent a huge amount of time on it, it will go twice as fast redoing it if you have some good ideas about where to take it to make it better.

I was a big fan of this battle plan, and right around the 4am mark that evening a bleary-eyed and hand-cramped Mitch sent me this magical update taped to the foot of a cranky owl:



After glancing at Mitch's first "real" stab at the design, I instantly felt an Ear To Ear Smile spell take over my face, as so many of the final elements of the design were already perfected. The most important part of the design, the wizards themselves and their skyward beard war being waged, was spot-on and beyond. I loved how much personality Mitch had given both wizards, their good and bad intentions revealed to the viewer within moments through different staffs and body positions.

Mitch had tried to incorporate both the feeling of doing magical battle high above on impossible cliffs, as well as a darker-tinged lava color oozing over the ground far below. The effect was especially convincing and impressive in an alternate colored version Mitch had sent as well, which told quite a stormy, different story than the lighter colored take:



What stood out right away in the darker wizard version was the orange slivers of highlight that glinted off the bottom of the bristling beards, an effect I thought doubled the foreboding ambiance and intensity of the scene. Oh, and it made the design look more bad-ass Heavy Metal and less Disney-flavored.

The main area of improvement I focused on with Mitch was at the bottom of the design, and finding ways to support the epic wizard whiskers colliding even more than it already was. Instead of seeing the ground at all, I wanted Mitch to embrace his original sketch of having this take place millions of miles up in the air, with lots of impossibly shaped and jagged cliffs bursting through the cloud cover in the sky, perhaps a castle on the top of one of them. I also asked Mitch if we could add a little more fluffy detail to the clouds that brilliantly made up both the bottom border and side portions of the design, as well as taking the snaky cloud out of the background since it distracted and confused the eyes from the beard battle being waged just above.

Mitch agreed and the next night sent this version whirling my way:



I was hoping to have this design completed with Mitch after two major revisions since I felt bad that he kept conjuring up a "finished" design that I might suggest making more changes to. Sadly that was not to come to pass, as Mitch and my communication lines got somewhat bewitched. While I really liked the wind-whipped feel of the new clouds in front of the design, I really loved the original, rounder cloudy border of the previous draft, and would love to transplant that kind of fog slowly rolling around some cliffs in the background, which would be poking through the dense cloud soup.

After getting his frustration out by putting a terrifying curse on me that flooded my mind with one hundred images of naked 90-year-old grandmas, Mitch sent me a rough version of the new groundscape to see if our walkie talkies were once again tuned to the same channel:



And that answer was one big "Roger, over and out!" The battle grounds for this beard brawl had finally reached the heights Mitch's first design doodle hinted at, but now blown out in all its technicolor, Battle For Middle Earth glory.



The finished editions soon made their final trek across the Computer Cables of Bandwidthich, including Mitch taking another crack at the colors for the charcoal tee version, and striking the perfect balance between a stormier, foreboding feel, without as much of the previously darker version's cheesier Halloween-ish color scheme.



Mitch and I wrestled (with our giant beards of course) with which version to use for the presentation, and finally decided to go with both since the color schemes almost made the design feel like two completely separate scenes. I asked if we could label them "Light Wizard" and "Evil Wizard" so people could associate each version with the specific wizard character, in effect choosing which side of the battle you are rooting for coming out as the king of beard spell-casters.

SUBBERINO!






If you wish to continue your finger-strengthening screen scrolling exercises, here's a couple more collabs up for voting!

With italiux:



With V.calahan:



With Cazking: