Comics I Like: Patton Oswalt

I like a good number of comics, but if you were to ask me my overall favorite, I'd have to go with Patton Oswalt. I remember when his 222 album had just come out and it seemed like no one knew who he was. No matter who I shared his album with; however, they were instant fans of his crazy characters and uniquely-worded rants. Now he's a famous actor whose voice starred in the Pixar classic Ratatouille and the disturbing but fascinating Big Fan, which I watched for the first time last night.

In Big Fan, Oswalt plays a New York Giants fan from Staten Island who accidentally disqualifies his favorite player from playing. Torn between standing up for himself or his team, his character's life is turned upside-down. You never know just how far he's been pushed by the humiliating circumstances in his life, and Oswalt plays the character with a mix of enthusiastic, pathetic, and even a bit deranged. I loved the movie, and it reminded me why I'm such a "big fan" of Oswalt himself.

As for the piece, I decided to keep with the caricature style that I've been developing this week. I've been tending to over-render the original sketch, which ends up hampering the digital coloring process a bit. Here's a photo of the original drawing (the scanner on my printer is acting up yet again, so I had to use my camera to get it into the computer):

I decided the sketch was too stretched, so I squashed him down a bit to the final proportion and painted the rest in Photoshop. Caricatures are never flattering, and I wanted to push this rendition of him in a disturbing direction, to mimic the character Oswalt plays in the movie:

Reference for Patton in Big Fan.