Imagined Blueprints // The Proton Pack
Ghostbusters captured my imagination from such an early age I can’t even remember a time before. I have fond memories of being about 6 years old, at primary school, armed with a full box of felt tip pens, carefully drawing my own make-believe ghosts… then frantically scribbling over the whole lot with the biggest yellow and blue pens I could find, imagining it was a proton stream! So it was only natural that, 30 years later, I’d pick up the pens again…
That being said, before I even picked up a pen (even a digital one) I started gathering reference materials: screenshots from the films, behind-the-scenes photos of the props, and any other imagery which might help. Lucky for me there’s a fantastically talented and passionate fanbase out there as well, so I was able to find a lot of great material on various forums and fan-sites.
I’m also incredibly lucky to own a hero replica Proton Pack, which was built for me by Nick-a-tron (one of the finest prop-makers out there) a few years ago. This was a huge help in getting some proper measurements and poking around some of the finer details.
After I’d filled my brain with as much base information as I could find, I started scribbling out some shapes. I did this in Clipstudio Paint (CSP) on my Wacom Cintiq Pro 24 using a thick blue pencil brush. At this stage it’s more about ‘massing’ than detail, so I wanted to get the silhouette right and get in some of the more recognisable elements.
There’s also loads of random notes to myself along the way: reminders to check details, general annotations, and plenty of self-motivational notes (ie. “this looks rubbish, fix it tomorrow!”). Keen eyes will also spot that I originally planned on having the neutrona wand attached…
Once I’d got the overall shape feeling ‘a bit right’ I started overlaying some construction lines for the next stage. I took some key dimensions from the replica prop to help me keep things as accurate as possible, and started laying in some more detail. I used one of my custom brushes made to look like a traditional 0.5mm mechanical pencil with 2H lead. With CSP’s built-in ruler tool (absolutely life-changer) and locking off my Cintiq at a specific zoom I was able to draw orthographic lines to a proper measured drawing scale.
It was around about this stage that I started thinking about the extra details I wanted to add in. I knew from the start that I wanted this to be a lot more detailed than my previous drawings, so I began thinking about cutaway sections to show what might be inside making it tick. Ghostbusters has one of the most active and imaginative fandoms out there so I quickly found myself getting lost in the decades of information that others had gathered and come up with themselves! Every single part has been given a name and function by far greater minds than mine, so I decided to build up some of those ideas rather than go against decades of dedicated fan logic (Ghostheads - if I have done something that doesn’t make sense, please don’t shout at me, I’m fragile).
With all that in mind I started sketching in extra details that would fit the function of some of those key components. The extract here shows the ‘Crank Generator’ and ‘Gearbox/Vacuum Pump’ assembly in the top middle, with a bit of the Booster Tube and Ion Arm on the left. I wanted to rationalise the visible components with internal details that matched their name and function, staying true to the fandom and canon whilst still having a bit of fun adding in a few bits of my own! With prompts like ‘crank’, ‘gearbox’, and ‘vacuum’ it wasn’t too tricky to figure out some hardware that made sense in the context and physically looked right in the drawing, so I loosely sketched in some bits. Where I wanted a bit more believability on something, like the complicated gearbox assembly, I directly dropped in a bit of reference to work over.
By this point I’d built up a pretty comprehensive base drawing. Next up is inking over everything, trying to follow the base sketch as close as I can whilst adding in as much detail as I dared. I used another of my custom brushes; this one originally as an 0.18mm Rotring ink fineliner for my architectural work, but doing well enough here too! That being said I probably used the eraser tool as much as the inking brush at this stage - after adding a detail I would zoom out to the whole thing, then zoom back in and chop bits around until all felt right at both scales.
After many hours of inking the whole thing really started to look believable! I mentioned earlier that I’d gathered loads of reference images of the proton pack itself to help me get going; I also spent a lot of time looking at things like vintage engineering blueprints and patent drawings to give me an idea of where I wanted the piece to end up.
I’m an architectural designer by profession so I’m used to making technical drawings, though generally it’s big ol’ buildings rather than intricate bits of imagined sci-fi engineering! Either way it felt right to add some dimensions to bring it to life, maybe make it feel more like something it could be or even might have been built from.
Annoyingly this took the longest of any individual stage of the drawing! I’d been drawing to scale and had accurate measurements of everything so that wouldn’t be a problem… but I’d been working in metric. Although 99% of the planet have seen the light and adopted the metric system, it’s very much not what the (American) Boys in Beige would have used if this really was one of their working drawings. So began an incredibly slow process of converting every single one of my annotated dimensions into that alien language of feet, fractions and frustration… but I got there in the end!
Having dropped in dimensions the drawing was getting nicely intricate, but also a bit samey with everything in the 0.18mm lineweight. Time to add some hierarchy and depth!
I used thicker inking brushes (0.35mm and 0.50mm) to outline the key components and overall silhouette, which helped bring the more important bits forward in the drawing. To balance that out I also decided to add in some shading with 45-degree hatching in a 2B pencil brush, which really pushed back the deeper parts and added some volume to the whole piece.
Next up was some hand-written annotations to pull things back together. These ended up being a combination of established fan-canon and some of my own invention, really just trying to add a layer of story that felt like a part of the piece. The last thing I ended up doing at this stage was adding a red line and some hatching to the cutaway areas, which is something I’d seen in a few engineering reference drawings and really liked. I think they help those areas really pop a bit more, and feel suitably ‘different’ from the external parts around them.
With the drawing itself starting to feel finished, I looked back over the reference blueprints and thought the piece deserved a little more story than just being a really sterile and lovingly polished technical drawing - that didn’t fit the way I imagined this might have been made! So I knocked up a drawing title block (including the original ‘too subtle’ logo from the early part of the first film!), and started building in more in-universe credibility…
It was at this point that the drawing really started taking on a life of its own, feeling like a proper artefact that had been drawn up in the Firehouse and passed around for comments. I started layering on mark-ups and notes between the characters; I’d gone from imagining what was inside the pack to imagining what was going on around the time it was being made (yeah, I went off the deep end!).
Having imagined what happened to the drawing when it was made, I started imagining what might have happened to it after the packs had been built. It probably would have been folded up and chucked in a file and forgotten about… until someone dug it out to refer to, maybe spilt coffee on it, left it on the floor and put a muddy boot-print on it, chucked it back in the file, got it it out, accidentally torn it, taped it back up, chucked it back in the file… and so on and so on, until one day it’s found at the bottom of a dusty old archive box and preserved as a historic artefact!
Despite the fact I was actively destroying parts of the drawing I’d spent days creating, this was one of the more strangely satisfying parts of the process. I dropped the drawing onto a background of suitably ruined paper, adding on bits of tape and dirt and scuffs and coffee cup stains, and using layer masks in Photoshop to rub off the ink where it would have been on a folded edge. All those hours spent watching Adam Savage viciously weather physical props has paid off for me… Strangely satisfying, I promise!
If you’ve enjoyed the story of this drawing coming to life, you can head over to my Print Shop and pick up a copy of your own. You really do have to see a printed version in person to appreciate how much fun I had making it!
