The Process

Today I thought I would share a bit of my process I use for completing a finished piece of art.

I got the inspiration for doing this piece from Rob Schamberger’s Bi-weekly art jam section of the KC Comix scenes message board. This week he is doing Christopher Reeve as Superman. I wanted to take a break from my stuff and do a fun kind of piece.

On Rob’s thread he provided everyone with some photos to use as a guide to there creation. Normally I have no problems using photo referencing, I use it quite a bit for my two books, but I wanted a break from that and decided to just “freestyle” on this one.

Once I came up with my concept pose I started my research on the man of steels costume. This was not what I was wanting to draw. For the most part superman has a very boring to draw, costume. I myself love drawing details, and really had my heart set on that. So I scraped the Superman idea and went with the only other Superhero more “American” than Superman, Captain America.

I did my research and noticed caps costume was a bit boring and dated too, so I gave my cap an update for 2005! I stared fleshing it out and adding the little details; I also played around with the ideas for my background. The total penciling process took me about 4 hours. Not to bad, but pin-up type art is always faster than sequential when laying down the lead.

Next I started the inks. I begin by just inking the details and leaving the lighting effects for later.

Here you can see where I started. I use (Micron) pens for most of the detail, and acrylic (zillar) soot black ink, with a brush. These two tools I use for 99% of my inking.
"flat" inks. Staring grays with the gun barrel



Next I add the “lighting” with the inks. Brush and ink, and some (Faber-Castell) brush pens work great for this as well, makes this process a little quicker without losing much as far as details.
Last but not least I add in the gray tones with (FW) gray acrylic ink and ink wash (my own mixture of course). For this, I every so sparkly used (Pantone) gray marker for some more effects.


Finally I inked up the background and erased all my pencils and I’m done! I started this piece late Saturday night, and finished it late Sunday/early Monday. Click here for a higher rez version, more suitable for viewing.
Hope you enjoyed this.

Later