IDW Covers: Doctor Who - The Prisoners Of Time #5

Doctor Who - The Prisoners Of Time #5 (IDW, May 2013)
Art by Dave Sim

DAVE SIM:

I'm pretty far outside the loop "DR. WHO-wise". I did read in the paper that this is the 50th anniversary of DR. WHO -- I had no idea it had been going on that long! So, I gather that's what IDW is making artful use of.

We haven't gotten to STAR TREK yet, but Chris had asked me to do a generic-variant cover and had sent images from the recent movie. And I ended up just doing Shatner and Nimoy, which he bought for another book but explained that they have the licence for the recent movies so I need to do those characters. So, when DR. WHO came up and the photo reference hadn't arrived, I thought AHA! They'll be doing the most recent DR.! So I looked him up on Google Image and did that. No, DR. WHO is the other way round: they're doing them in order and I was supposed to do No.5 and No.6 and had ended up doing No.11. AARGGH! He bought No.11 though.

However, now I'm all organised and I have about 30 or 40 images of each DOCTOR to pick from, I've just revisited the scans for No.5 to revisit my thought processes.

My idea, is "glamourpuss by stealth." I'll do DOCTOR WHO so that I can draw his pretty assistant (he always had a pretty assistant). Going through them again, I'm moved to wonder "Why didn't I do NYSSA?" She's stunningly pretty. The answer is she was always in the background and hard to draw clearly. Then I found a clear shot of her but she had changed her hairstyle from tight billowy perm to a "big Hair" wave which doesn't look nearly as good on her -- and she's wearing a really unfortunate (in my view) outfit. There was another companion named Tegan, though, so I started looking at her.

The last image in the "No.5 DOCTOR" file was a head and shoulders shot of her with a pixy cut. I found it kind of endearing because she was too old for a pixy cut at that point. At a certain age it can let you hang onto "young" for a couple of more years, but either she was past that age or she just didn't have the right facial structure to support it. Maybe both. So decided to draw what I figured she had been hoping she would look like with a pixy cut. Put a couple of gleams in her eyes and... this and that... the miracle of pen and ink plastic surgery!

The DOCTOR himself, I found a good Al Williamson shot of him kneeling next to the Tardis in a  sylvan setting which definitely gave the vertical strips on his pants that Al Williamson quality. I even grafted in a characteristic Al Williamson spotted toadstool.

Of course at that size, getting a good likeness is all but impossible, but that's what magnifying glasses and brand new Hunt 102 nibs are for. It's actually a better likeness that I remembered it being. I still have a lot to learn in that area, though.