One of the things I love is going online, finding other artists and reading about their artist process. It gives me new ways to think about things and insights into how they developed their particular style or gives me questions to ask myself as I create new pieces. So… I decided to post a step by step of my process of one of my latest illustrations. This piece was done as a imock-cover for a book for my friendMordechai Luchins. You can view the images below. Click for larger versions.
First let me say that this is not a book for Dark Horse Comics, even if I wish it were. I just loved the logo and since it’s a mock-cover.. i can do what I want.
So the first image below is the sketch i worked from. Sometimes I do thumbnails, and sometimes I do my sketches on layout paper. This was done on 14×17 layout paper at pretty near full size for a comic book page (11×17). I really wasn’t thinking ‘cover’ at the time, just more of an image because I was just setting out to draw something as a warm-up. It really was meant more of a sketch just to draw. But the idea had been stuck in my head for a cover for doing an image with the two heroes acting kind of tough, ready to take on the next fight. I originally thought about having an extreme foreground image of guys with guns or baseball bats, ect,.. to show some kind of impending danger, but I never really got around to working that into the scene. As I said this was more of a warm-up sketch at the time. A few days later I decided to make this into a cover, and I scanned this in and started moving it around on a comic cover layout to see how i could throw in a title, ect, and using my wacom tablet I tried again to establish some kind of scene. Again no dice.. nothing worked.. so I set it aside for a couple days, almost ready to just move onto something new.
The second image is what I call pre-inks. I had printed out the sketch onto 8.5×11 bond paper (basically regular printer paper) with a mock blue-line comic page frame to just see if i could create something from what I had. I wasn’t hopeful, but after looking at some work by artist Jae Lee, and how he sometimes just let his blacks of his figures just melt right into the shadow of a background, I decided to see what happened if I just let the background be black. I outlined all he figures, filled in the background with two or three half-dead sharpies (oh the smell) and then using a Pitt Brush Pen and a Micron Pigma Liner (size 1 or 3, can’t remember) I just began my process of pre-inking the piece. Doing this really helps me visualize how it will look as a finished piece, it lets me experiment with shadow and light and really just have fun. I wanted the lighting to be strong and really kind of come from the above and to the left slightly, and just let the figures melt into the shadows but still retain enough information to stand out from them as well. Sometimes this works great, sometimes you go through three sheets of paper before you realize.. it’s time to step away. For some reason though this one worked out great. I couldnt put it down, I just kept going until I was satisfied with the look.
Now bear in mind I didn’t add any grey-tones. I just wanted simple black and white relationships, and let the blackest blacks establish the forms.
The third images is the finished pencils. This stage was pretty simple, but probably the most time consuming. I printed out the pre-inks as blueline on 11×17 board. I just then penciled almost as if I were pencilling on a lightbox. I refined things, and added greytones. It’s hard to explain this process as it just is what it is.
The fourth image is the digital inks. Some artists swear by a brush. I actually prefer to use one when actually inking traditionally but man.. is it a step that just bores me to tears. I prefer just the drawing side of things. Soo.. I tried something new here that I really liked. I took the pencils from the previous stage and threw them on a comic book blue-line template I have. I sized them how I wanted them to leave room for a logo later. I darkened the pencils slightly using the curves feature in photoshop to adjust the darkness and brighten up the whites, but only so much. Previously I would have done it to the point where the mid-tone grey of the pencils was almost black but this really choked up the lines and things would end up looking off to me. But after looking at Jae Lee’s work on the Dark Tower series by Marvel I was impressed how Richard Isonove would just take Jae Lee’s pencils and leave the pencils pretty much as is and almost paint the blacks over top. I did the same thing just using the hard round brush in photoshop with the hardness pulled down to almost nothing. I can’t say how much I loved this method. It was a little time consuming but a few hours and the piece was finished. And I didn’t even have to get my hands all inky…
The last image is the final image. I added color in photoshop and let me say.. if I had a real colorist this would probably look so much better. I’m the world’s laziest artist when it comes to color. I basically added some quick base colors as local color and then threw a bright vibrant red as an overlay on top and adjusted layers until i got it the way i wanted. Simple. Not too much. For some reason the colors came off making me think of a Hellboy cover so I was happy at that point. I added a little signature texture that I like just for giggles and with that. I was done.
