I wanted something new to draw, and, yesterday, I saw this.
I wanted to make an image on the tablet from the ground up, but I'm still learning how to draw on it. I used the copious reference images online from LOTR and Marvel and Frankensteined the elements. This is much closer to what I normally make in Illustrator, but it was all done in Photoshop.
My son, The Lieutenant, asked for a Thing drawing, and I of course inflated the request. I decided to make a cover. With him fighting someone. Maybe a swarm of aliens. While I'm learning a tablet. Sure.
I made my usual 9 panels of compositions to find the right one. And then I did a large sketch of the one I liked at a size near the finished piece's dimensions. I originally thought of Thing fighting the Brood, but they're so close to Xenomorphs that I decided to go with the latter, since that's what my son was familiar with.
Then I worked up the pencils in a 10x15 blueline frame. There are so many alien variations, and I used an action figure my son has.
Then I scanned this and inked it on the new tablet. I recreated the Thing cover elements in Illustrator and moved them as an art layer into Photoshop.
Then I colored. Or tried to.
For the upper corner box, I sketched a Thing head and finished it in Adobe.
The bottom corner box is a stylized font to look like a UPC code.
I would call this a successful experiment but not a successful product. It feels clunky. The color layering is a throwback, inspired by the '80s comic aesthetic. But I'm getting better at digital inking, and soon I'll move beyond inking in black and into color outlines.
Kit is my favorite Jedi. Not so much for his prequel appearances, but for Clone Wars. There's an episode where he goes Groundskeeper Willie and strips to the waist for underwater action. It's a happy, brazen act for a group of people who are usually neither. He has personality. I rooted for him, even though he [spoiler] died in the blink of an eye against Palpatine.
I'm still working with the Wacom tablet, trying to learn digital inking and thinking in terms of painting. It's not like a coloring book, but that's where my brain is currently.
I sketched out our boy on paper and took a photo.
I downloaded the picture and inked it digitally. That let me make the background shapes in Illustrator and import them to Photoshop and I created the lightsaber hilt in the latter program too. The hilt was created on a separate layer, and I erased its lines to look like it was inside the hand.
And then I color doodled with brushes and opacity. I needed a background behind the stars so I grabbed the colors from Geonosis.
My son and I make a date each week to watch All Elite Wrestling Dynamite. Usually it's Thursday after school. It's a fun show. We howl often. They have a sharp roster of performers, able to work comedy and conflict equally.
My son is ten so the boldest characters catch his eye first. Darby Allin, the Ghost Rider with a skateboard? Yeah, that's his favorite. Me, I'm a simple man. I like luchadores and terrible lizards, and by God there's a guy named Luchasaurus. Yes. YES.
He's seven feet tall and does standing backflips while wearing a dinosaur mask.
I had to draw him.
I'm still learning this new tablet, so I drew the pencils on paper, took a photo, and inked it digitally.
I was scrolling Twitter for drawing inspiration, and I found this from 2014.
The universe provides, sometimes.
I drew a Future Velma back in 2016 because she is the best of the five.
I sketched out a few vague poses before thinking the art needed to be spooky fun, so let's bring in a bad guy. And a skull in a spacesuit is my jam and my bop and my 23 skiddo and all that.
(I asked my son, who's ten, if he had a favorite Scooby villain, and he said he didn't really care for the cartoon. I grew up on the reruns. I think one channel showed an hour of it daily as quality babysitting TV.)
I worked up the pencils quickly (for me) and inked it on paper. This is 10 x 15.
And to break in this here new tablet, I tried coloring it, which, as always, is done with breath held and muscles clenched for hours at a time.
I have a fixation, it seems, with the cinematic Wonder Woman/Captain America mashups.
For at least a year, I had the idea of Diana meeting her Winter Soldier, but of course it would be her former sidekick as the mysterious assassin. And so these pages were made this week.
The shoulder star is made of radiating Ws, which I like a lot.
Here are earlier pencils sketches of the pages.
I changed the top panel of page two quite a bit. It felt like I had similar panel compositions on page one twice already.
I posted the pages on my Tumblr and within the day someone liked a 2014 post I completely forgot about. I had already made THIS. This was going to be Diana as Steve's wartime comrade-in-arms to be rescued from a new kind of Amazon slavery. I really like this mash-up, apparently.
