Joe Fantastic

So recently I did a poster for the musician my brother Matt is jammin' with, or I should say drummin' with:)

I thought for this poster I would show my process a bit in how I approach a finished comic illustration. I always start out with some looser thumbnails to get a sense of composition and when I do this I always try to just focus on shapes and how they will read rather than proportions or details. I went with two different sketches to try different options...



I decided to go with the second rough and took it to the penciling stage. I'll do all my sketching and thumbnails in photoshop and then when I have something I like... I print it out on an 11 x 17 piece of paper within a 10 x 15 inch border and lightbox(trace and detail) it onto Strathmore illustration board. Once I'm done penciling, I begin inking it with a Pentel Brush Pen, and Micron pens for the little details. I don't seem to have the patience in dipping a traditional brush in ink, I favor the brush pen because it's so convenient, I highly recommend it. After I ink it, I mess with it in photoshop and clean up edges I might have messed up on and adjust proportions or details that aren't working. You can kind of see the differences from the pencils to the inks proportion wise with the figures...



After that I jump into color. I personally always start coloring by doing the whole piece in grayscale. It allows me to focus on values and making the piece read rather than getting overwhelmed with the palette. After it's finished in grayscale, I adjust those values into colors using gradient maps and the hue/saturation settings until I'm satisfied with a nice finish. The cool thing is, there are many different ways to color something in photoshop. This process happens to work for me the best because I can focus on one thing at a time. Then of course at the end I add the Logos and all that stuff to the finished piece. I wanted it to look old school, so I added the 10 cent addition to it like the 50's Action Comics back in the day. So, if you read this far hopefully I didn't put you to sleep and that it was helpful:) Thanks for checkin' it out and stay tuned for more stuff soon!