Frank's Sketchbook Entry of the Day

This year for the ultimate frisbee summer league, the team names are based on trees. We got hemlock as the base name and decided to touch it up as Hucking Hemlocks (a huck is a long throw in ultimate). I decided we should have a graphic for the web site that wasn't just the standard graphic that every team had with a different color. I was thinking of a tree that could huck and this side of an Ent from Lord of the Rings, Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy was on the top of the list. His entire language is mostly just the phrase "I am Groot".

Originally, I thought he might be handblocking which means exactly what it sounds like, and since he has long arms and hands, he'd be more likely to do that. I needed to find a picture of him with his arms. I found one online that was close, but the right arm was hanging straight down and the bottom of it was kind of cut off by a blur. I did some copy and paste and rotate and masks, and managed to rotate his upper arm so it was at a 45° angle, and then just use his left forearm to make it fit. I've always been bad at thumbs and on which side they belonged, but I knew having two left hands wouldn't work. Plus I needed to see the palm side of his hand. I found another picture where I could sort of use his hand. I did some brightness adjustments and more masking and got it reasonably close.

Then I decided there should be some background. After some searching, I found a decent empty soccer field that would serve as a background. Then I used a lens blur in Photoshop to add a little soft blur to it. Then I added the team name in the box at the bottom and his speech balloon on the top (in Illustrator). Also, I had downloaded some Groot/tree fonts, but wound up using something I already had (Hobo Std). As a last step, I updated the name (the title was originally Handblocking Hucking Hemlocks), changed the speech balloon to be "I am Hemlock." which felt right, and then realized it looked like he was making a right-handed forehand huck, so I took an image from this year's league disc, applied some perspective warping on it, used more masks to let his thumb show throw, and thus it was complete. Simple... (but it does amuse me).