Behind the Scenes of All-Star Vinyl: All Business LeBron Part One

Upper Deck’s All-Star Vinyl designer toy line got off to a roaring start with the online only release of the All-Star edition of Athlete LeBron  which sold out in just over an hour last Wednesday.  The series is a partnership with Nike  based on their popular ad campaign “The LeBrons" and will feature a figure for each of his four personas: Athlete LeBron, All Business LeBron, Wise LeBron and Kid LeBron. All four figures will be released as part of The Chosen One Edition in April.   Previously we brought you behind-the-scenes for the development of Athlete LeBron.  Today we start our coverage of the process of bringing  All Business LeBron to 3D reality.

Today, a look at the initial sketchwork  done by Upper Deck’s lead designer on the product line, Chris Brunner.  As with Athlete LeBron, Chris worked from photographs provided by Nike from the commercial shoot to create the turnaround drawings which were then used to produce a sculpt. Chris talks about the progression from the work on Athlete LeBron to All Business LeBron:

Business Lebron was a much more straight foward process, so much of what I sweated before with the Athlete version was locked in this time around. It was as much about remaining consistent as anything else. Can’t overstate the impact of seeing Rocco’s sculpt beforehand, he’d nailed the style, and being able to see it for real was an education. Working from reference there’s usually (hopefully) bits from several shots you combine to stay dynamic, but one of these had a perfect pose. His attitude and suit pulled in different directions though, because of the way the suit wrinkled and bunched up in places. It was  one of those many things that look fine in a photo and silly on paper. I started with just the figure lined up in the proportions of the previous design, and tried to amplify the pose as much as possible. Although the aim was a streamlined suit, I didn’t think wrinkles and bagginess on the slacks could be eliminated and remain convincing, even though it turned out that way. Course getting there went through all kinds of variations, all somewhat embarassingly zoot suit-ish The exact relaxed lean and shape of the shoulders gave me a lot of sass, sometimes appeared to be shoulder pads and sometimes huge shoulders.

It’s pretty obvious that suit placement is all thats going on, cause there is some real crude and ugly drawing here- all of it just searching for those shapes. No matter how many times I’ve learned the hard way that simple is better, it seems like cheating. In this case I was especially wary of a simple solution, as that could look nice 2D and not translate when it got handed to Rocco.  It ended up that Chris Ortega, another UD illustrator, dug out a "how to" book from the 50’s that diagramed exactly where suits rest on and hang off a figure. Thank you Chris! Knowing how it worked made it easy to throw out the photo reference, find the 3 or 4 simple lines that would hold up in a sculpt, and cut all the other junk. Once the structure is solid, I just kind of go, so there’s not much else to say.

Check back next week for a look at the progression of the sculpt for All Business LeBron.