Phew, glad to hear all the good reactions!
I was nervous about these because Ghostbusters means a lot to me (and a lot of people) so I wanted to make sure I did them justice, especially for the 30th anniversary.
Ajax wrote:is this something you had planned for awhile or just something you started over the last week? Were they difficult to create or just kind of came quickly out of the creative process? I would like to hear more about the background on something so epic as four fairly difficult patterns in one day.
Planned to do these all along, to commemorate the anniversary year, and started designing some of the guys a while back. But I didn't get all 4 completely finished to my satisfaction until just recently.
Egon was done first, he came quickly. Must be the iconic glasses and hair.
Ray was designed next, and I was content after just one sketch.
Peter was a bit trickier, he went through 3-4 iterations.
Winston was the last one finished, and the hardest - and this is no disrespect to the oft-sidelined "fourth Ghostbuster." It was simply because of a lack of good reference material. 1984 is way before the internet and HD/4K video. And at the time, the three other guys got top billing and their faces on all the posters and promo materials. There's just not much high quality imagery of Winston out there! It actually took me 17 attempts to get a sketch of Winston that I was pleased with! And no, you can't see the failed attempts.
Even with some of the guys done earlier, I felt that I should post them all at once. What if I just posted Ray, but didn't get the others done in time? I'd be hounded with emails asking where the other boys in grey were. I took an all or nothing approach.
Also, it made sense to finalize the designs all together because I wanted to make sure they had a cohesive look. I was determined to have a similar pose and consistent lighting (they're all lit from the right, shadowed on the left). They each have nearly the same amount of cut-outs, so the difficulty of each is about the same. The idea is that you can place them all side by side, and it will look like a complete set, in the same style, like a scene out of the movie.
Finally, I wanted to make a cool photo to show off the designs, and decided on the ghost trap image. Aside from pattern design, I also really enjoy photography and digital photo manipulation, so images like this are a lot of fun to make.