Next Epic - Superman I&II

All right, more Superman.  This is, after all, a hero kind of summer.  Here's the comp for the next big painting.  I decided to stop doing this comps on gray paper with a value drawing, and just skipped ahead to the color comp.  So this will be the underdrawing for that, and I'll do comp colors digitally.  I'm glad I did do this comp - in setting it up I missed a couple of composition issues that I'll fix in the next stage, but seemed pretty apparent as I did the work of actually drawing everything out.  I might shift everything up slightly, and lower Non's (upper left) face to be lower than Zod's, in line with Ursa.

The theme of this piece is Rescue, Superman coming to save Metropolis from the coming invasion, protecting his loved ones, and even the fools that can't seem to get out of their own way.




So this is early preproduction for this one, but you might be wondering where all the other ones are, Predator, Sleeping Beauty - Facebook followers got treated to a preview of the about-half-finished Road Warrior painting, with a close up of Dog.

Here comes the BOOM!

Rainbow Dash. Sonic Rainboom.



Yeah, I'm a Brony.  So what?

Cap Vs. Hydra

Here's a quick story I came up with - what if Hydra actually built a robotic Hydra to enter into battles?  And then Cap had to show up to fight it?  And then if he cut one of the heads off - even though it's a robot - two heads grew in it's place?  I wrote it in a three act sequence, with a prologue, act 1, act 2, and finally act 3 , with a cliffhanger.

Anyways, here's the layouts for the opening to this fight...

Cap - Step by Step

After loving the Avengers, loving the Cap movie, I just didn't LOVE the Avengers Cap costume this time around.  Now, that's not saying it wasn't really, really good - but I wanted to just see a different version of that costume, with a few tweaks here and there.  Mostly, with the A, and the stars on the chest and shield made a little bigger, add the helmet wings, and under-design the fabrics.  That zipper was a bit too much for me. 

And I really liked the pose I came up with, for last year's Cap painting, so I decided to reuse it for the re-design.

Here's a reminder of the drawing, now on to the revision!

I re-sketched it, made him a bit beefier, and re-positioned him in the frame, to suit the single character image.

And so begins the usual process, where I add the flat colors.

Then create an overlay layer, using a near white to bring out the lighter areas.

Here I do a little massaging of all the colors, and add in the winglets.

Before I get too locked in with the figure colors, I add in the background.  For this I just created the star spangled elements, and then used the Warp Transformation tool to create the flow of the flag.  Sometimes when you use this, weird artifacts and aliasing can occur, but since I knew it was for a background, I could soften away those bits with the blur tool.

And here's the final, with color tweaks, and final shading, highlights, and F/X.

And that's it for me this week - gotta finish up a project and head down to San Diego!

Captain America!!!

World's Finest sketches...

Watch out, bad guys.

So, the second pass at these guys yields better likenesses, and I'm pretty happy with this as a cool little sketch.  But, I need to put a little more time into Superman, so bye-bye for now, Batman.  (In Joker voice.)

This is a very meaningful image from my childhood, I had a similar poster of this when I was really little, along with Star Wars, Close Encounters, and an erupting Mt. St. Helens (being originally from Washington State) - it was a sideways poster I think, with a city street background.  And I, like MANY kids I'm sure, struck that pose and ran swoooooshing down the hallway towards my room.  And that was a run back then, although now it's literally two long strides from the old point A to point B.

But I digress - this will be the anchor to the next forgotten movie poster painting I do.

Bats&Supes Sketches

Been on a movie kick lately, watching that first series of Batman movies, starting with Burton's '89 film, and revisiting the Batman Animated Series as well.

But that is just in anticipation of going to see Dark Knight Rises - I'm really all about Superman '78, getting a comp together for the next epic, which will be themed Superman I - II, the two-parter that was originally intended to be one giant film.

But I got bats in the brain, so I'm doing a little World's Finest (Movie Style), to ease into practicing likenesses for Christopher Reeves - but first, here's a little Michael Keaton:

And then on to the real subject.  Probably the first time I drew what was meant to be a movie Superman since the early eighties:

Still needs a little practice, good thing I have a lot of pencils...

On Friday, a two-shot of the Movie World's Finest.