Rooftop Hellboy
I’ve noticed that I tend to go for mostly video game characters and not much else when I chose to color something. I don’t know why, it seems to me like there’s more room for interpretation with those guys. Either way, it seems comics and cartoons are not getting enough love and here’s one of my first steps towards remedying that.
Quick comments after the break.
The first thing I decided on when I started this was that I would not under any circumstance try to ape Mignola. His work with light and shadow is nothing short of sublime and me trying to capture a fraction of that would: a) be most likely met with failure and b) not result in an interesting picture if I’m just copying the style of the character’s original creator. So, as you can see, there isn’t a single black shadow on Hellboy though I did go with an all black night sky. And speaking of which, I actually put in a background this time… Sort of.
In coloring this, I found that somewhere in the opposite end of Mignola’s contrast heavy, shadow heavy artwork lies something similar to my preferred method of coloring, which is kind of of an animation style, hard-edged shading. That’s what has worked for me in the past so that’s what I went for. I’m still trying to teach myself Corel’s Painter so I used that for this piece and tweaked a couple of things via Photoshop.
I’m feeling pretty good about how this turned out overall though I completely forgot to save at the various stages so there’s no progress GIF for this baby.
P.S.: I promise I’ll draw a real background someday.
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Posted in Comics, Illustration |
