Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Look out! Beast!


Well, Emerald City Comic Con is right around the corner.  Oh...did I not mention I was going to be there?  Details still being worked out; prints, 2012 sketchbooks, etc. etc.  I'll post something official in a couple weeks, when I get everything sorted out 100%.

So that means I'll take another run at Marvel, and do a couple of new pieces to bring along with me.  I wanted do a character I've never even drawn before - and though he's a X character I really think is cool, for whatever reasons I'd never attempted an image of him.

Since he perceives himself a monster, I thought it might be cool to evoke a Basil Gogos type feel to the image.  But instead of just doing a portrait, I infused a bit more action by adding the hands thrusting out at the viewer.


I roughed out over the sketch, and added in some tone work...


...and to keep things straight, I did the hands separately.  I knew that when I moved on to the color fill, I would need to use different colors to help set off the background and foreground elements, I didn't want the setups to be a big blue blob.


And here is where a little of that Gogos influence comes in, that slight purple-y red offset color to indicate bounce lighting, in contrast to the cast lighting that brings out the lighter blues.  And at this point, the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors are set, so it's time to begin the detail render.


Still using a broader brush size, with lower color opacity to build it up more.


I felt that the color setups had run their course, so to find the highlight colors, I created and overlay layer, and used color picks, and brought up the lightness, and dropped the saturation to near white, to help pop certain areas.  Then I merge that down, and do another detail pass.


After the final detail pass, I made color and tone adjustments, reassessing the overall focal point to the image - there was a lot of electric blue going on overall, so I reduced it down to the face, and brought in more of the bounce color to soften the hands, and reduce the visual conflict that was going on.

Final!  And I'm really happy with it too, for once...

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