Back to the Future is now available!

A few months ago I was asked to create the art for a Back to the Future card game. It was released yesterday. Getting some good reviews and now I'm just waiting to get my samples. Not yet available on amazon, but you can definitely bug your local comic shop. I'm sure That's Entertainment will carry a few copies.

The best thing is, now I can post some of the art...here's some rough sketches and final pics of the cars. First the sketches (show your work!)...

These are mostly just sketches and thumbnails for communicating with the client. The most difficult one was the last one, the lightning-powered Delorean from the end of the first movie. We needed to cram a whole lot of information into a very small space:

• Car needs to look cool (a little bit in-your-face, never small or far away) 
• Car needs to be visually distinct from other versions (in this case the only major diff was the fishing pole antenna), 
• Show the town is still 1950's, not run-down 1980's
• Show the lightning/streetlight apparatus
• And what the hell, let's put the clock-tower into it

And it all needs to fit into the efficient little space of a half a playing card. Lotta rounds of discussion on that one.

Here are some of the final Deloreans.

As you can see, not all the sketches were used, which is why it's nice to have a place to post this kind of stuff that would otherwise just end up in the memory hole.

One of the things that I've discovered in my month-long crash course into becoming an expert in BttF was that every home-built car, every illustration, every representation you'll find online is wrong. Almost no reproduction of the car is ever faithful, so I spent about 50% of my time doing research, mainly consisting of watching the films in slo-mo (huge thanks to  Mr Scymszlacks for letting me borrow his BttF dvd set).

Speaking of insane details, here's the train. This was about the toughest part of the whole project. It works very differently than I originally thought (thanks to my dad for pointing out that the rockets that hold it aloft are under the center of the train, and not in the wheels). Every piece on it has a purpose. It is either: a larger version of a piece that was on the Delorean; a clever re-purposing of the train's steam power source; or a reference to the submarine in Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues. It's really kind of amazing.

It was an honor to be able to add to the pantheon of this story. The only thing I wish I could have done was the character likenesses, which for legal purposes just wasn't possible.