I have always been a huge X-Men fan. When I worked at Checkerbee Publishing in Connecticut, one of the books produced there was a price guide for X-Men comic books. The cover of that book showed a couple of comic book covers and a couple of X-Men action figures. I thought it was a boring cover and it didn’t appeal to people who might actually buy this book (i.e. me.) But, I was brand new to this job (and professional graphic design) at this point, so my opinion was dismissed. I started brainstorming what the cover would look like if I had been allowed to draw it.
The cover needed to showcase the history of the X-Men, so I chose the major characters who have been on the team over the past 30+ years. To show the scope of time, I opted for a collage look to the drawing. I wasn’t used to drawing collages, but I was up for the challenge.
This drawing was spread out over months, but it was always sitting on my drafting table, calling out to be finished. When I finally finished pencilling it, I wanted to ink it and see the finished product. I have found that this type of board does not take ink very well. Wanting to see a finished product, I decided to color it on the computer.
I scanned in the drawing and started to manipulate it in Photoshop. The first thing that I did was increase the grays to black. Then I separated the drawing from the white background. I filled in the blacks and cleaned up some of the lines. This was my attempt to remove the “sketchy-ness” of the drawing. A couple of the elements, Magneto’s helmet and the Phoenix logo, were done in Illustrator and then imported into the Photoshop file. These were graphic elements, so I wanted them to look just right. I colored the image using layers in Photoshop. It probably would have been easier if I had used a tablet, but that wasn’t available to me.
I’m glad that I was able to see one of my pieces in full color. But I’m also glad that I didn’t have to run the risk of ruining one of my better pieces of pencilled artwork.
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October 5, 2008 at 10:55 am
[...] drawing, I wanted to try to color it in Photoshop. I had done this once before with a different ...