September 10th 2016

Sometimes I draw things for kids.

When birthday parties roll around i am often ask if i could draw something for the child rather than just buy a gift. I have no problem with this. It’s more personal and much more fun than randomly grabbing something off a shelf at a toy store.

This time it was for two kids. Nephews of mine. I was told they liked Iron Man… and the Hulk… and Spider-Man… and that i could just pick one. So, of course i drew all three. But don’t let me get ahead of myself. First i started with a layout!

I wanted to go with something simple to start out with. A nice symmetrical design. An X!

I then roughed in some bodies fighting. Not being a fan of Iron Man or tech in general i pushed him tot he background. (it should be noted here that these were done on notebook paper at work. That’s why they have horizontal lines in them.

Step three; i clean up the rough scans a little in Photoshop. Sizes change. Positions shift. It’s all in flux.

Then i clean them up a lot. A lesser person would have stopped here… i am not a lesser person.

I took my “rough” into Manga Studio and “inked” it. I use “quotes” a lot.

Here i dropped in some color. This was done back in Photoshop for those playing along at home.

I add some adjustment layers to round out the shapes a little…

Here i did a few things in one step. 1-i added a star field in the background to break up that solid shape. 2-i “blue-d” up all the colors to bring them in line with one another. 3-there is also a slight recycled paper texture over the whole thing now to again bring all the elements together.

This entire process took a few hours. I’d say 7-8 maybe. I don’t think that’s bad.