A Series 12 Thirteenth Doctor fan art piece in the style of Lee Binding’s work for Doctor Who: The Collection.
I chose Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror as the episode represented on the cover for these reasons:
- It’s one of my favourite episodes from this season.
- The Doctor doesn’t wear a black shirt like the one I used on Series 11, nor a blue shirt like the one I used on Series 13. I try to represent different outfits on every cover.
- There’s a recognisable hand-held object; a.k.a. the green orb.
I started this piece way back in May right after doing my Series 13 piece. I spent a long time working on the Doctor composite but it never looked right to me. Fast forward to now, in October, I opened up the project file again… and decided to start from scratch. I think I over-Photoshopped it in my first attempt, using many many pictures to get the pose right; But somehow, my second attempt was simpler, used far fewer pictures and less puppet warping and Smart Objects, and worked better in my eyes.
One of the big challenges was getting the orb sphere to look right in her hand. My Blu-ray copy of Series 12 was bought secondhand, and of course – for some reason – Nikola Tesla is the only episode that doesn’t play correctly cause of a disc error; which means I couldn’t rip it to get high quality screencaps of her holding the orb. The first attempt used a hand from a picture from Revolution of the Daleks where the Doctor holds prison food. The second attempt uses a picture from The Timeless Children where she holds a miniaturised Cyberman.
With this, I have finally completed covers for the entire 2005 series of Doctor Who. I didn’t originally think I’d get to this point. I set out to do the Peter Capaldi seasons just because I wanted to see what they could look like, but then I did the Wilderness Years, and then Series 7, and I just kept doing another after another. I’ve gained a lot of practice with Photoshop through doing these covers and I’ve ended up with a project bigger than I thought it’d be. I’m so happy to have made something. Also it’s pretty neat and poetic in a way, completely unintentionally, that this series of modern covers concluded (for the moment) with Series 12 – while the official series of Collection box sets and their covers began with the classic Season 12.
Hopefully one day I’ll do Ncuti Gatwa’s Series 14 / Season One.
Special thanks to The Black Archive for their much appreciated work compiling high quality images.