Not a perfect 10 - My DoodleDoodledayeo Round 8

My doodle for @opheliafu's DoodleDoodledayeo Round 8 was a bit of a comedy of errors. The prompt was Superhero / Diamond / Squid. Inspired partly by my favorite superhero the ever-lovin' blue-eyed Thing I figured I'd do a made-of-diamond superhero fighting a giant squid. As I was imagining that, I thought of a cackling villain with aquatic-creature-control powers mocking the hero with some hardness-related pun. That made me think of the traditional hardness scale and gave me a name for the hero, Mister Moh (joke's on me, I had misremembered, it's the Mohs scale not the Moh scale, but the name was stuck in my head). I started trying to sketch some things but I immediately discovered that my reach had exceeded my grasp trying to draw a diamond-faceted rock-monster guy. Eventually I decided to go a little more abstract and cartoony with it, which I was able to implement a bit better.

I was originally going to make the symbol on his superhero costume a diagram of the crystalline structure of diamond (inspired by Dr. Manhattan's Hydrogen-inspired symbol). That was also a bit hard to draw at the scale I was working with, and then it occurred to me that diamond is a 10 on the Mohs scale so his symbol should be a 10, which amused me because it would make his superhero costume look like a sports jersey. (In the fantasy universe where Mister Moh is an ongoing character there would be a lot of "perfect 10" references). I needed to clean up some eraser marks from my primary sketch, so I scanned it in:

and did some erasing in GIMP and used the color levels tool to get rid of the scanning effects of the paper background. Then I loaded it into Inkscape where I did a bitmap-trace and added the text for the villain's taunt (in Comic Sans, since it amuses me that so many people hate that font so much) and generated my final image:

The spirit of Doodle Doodledayeo is supposed to be simple and fun, but for some reason this one really ended up being more trouble than I expected when I started. Maybe the "hardness" metaphor was manifesting in my real life, too?

As a final note, people who are interested in fun drawing activities like Doodle Doodledayeo might want to read my post about my simple pencil-and-paper drawing game "Four Panels" where I have a bunch of scans of the results of playing it, which are fun little drawings.