Red Leader Standing By – My DoodleDoodledayeo Round 11

For the past few years my siblings and I have been doing a Secret Santa gift exchange, but, because trying to figure out what to get for people was always a bit of a hassle, this year we switched to the idea of hand-made gifts, such as hand-made Christmas ornaments. I needed to make something for my brother and his wife and kids, and since Disney is trying to get everybody to associate the Christmas season with Star Wars, and because a love of Star Wars is something I always shared with my brother, I thought about the idea of making a Star Wars themed ornament. One of the ideas that came to me was that in the original Star Wars Luke flew his mission against the Death Star as part of Red Squadron, his commanding officer's callsign is Red Leader, and red is a traditionally Christmas-y color. Santa wears red, and he's like the leader of the elves... So I had the idea to do a mashup between Santa Claus and a Rebel X-Wing pilot. I eventually went a different direction with the ornament, but when I saw the prompt for this week's DoodleDoodledayeo was Gift / Sleigh / Delivery I felt like that idea was the perfect fit. When you need a proton torpedo present delivered down a thermal exhaust port chimney...

My original plan was going to be a bit more elaborate, an animation based on the one they show in the mission briefing. However I'm still having trouble getting that to look the way I want. I figured a cartoony illustration was more within my skillset so as a backup plan I drew this:

I did some color-manipulation in GIMP to get rid of some scanning artifacts, erased some eraser marks, and then used the bitmap tracing feature in Inkscape to clean up the lines a bit:

I also tried coloring this one after I scanned it in, but I haven't developed good techniques for that yet. I think my current system does a good job of preserving the pencil-drawn look in black and white, but I think I need to work backwards and figure out some different tool options to give me something with crisper outlines and darker lines so I can get color up to the edges. Oh well, at least I think my final black and white image achieved most of what I was going for.