In Progress: X-Men 150 – Part 2

Comments // Aug 10th, 2008 // Graphic Design, How To, Illustration, In Progress

Click here for Part 1

After I finished the pencilled drawing, I wanted to try to color it in Photoshop.  I had done this once before with a different X-Men drawing. As I was scanning in the drawing, I was able to really see the illustration from afar.  When I looked at it from a new angle, I noticed that Magneto’s leg was not drawn very well. I would have to fix this in Photoshop.

And then I remembered my brand new Wacom Intuos tablet!

I figured that this would be the perfect project to start practicing using the tablet.  So, I started “inking” the drawing.I’ve always pencilled from left to right, and then inked from right to left.  This was to help avoid smudging the graphite. For this project, that wouldn’t be a problem.  

I started by inking Cyclops.  It probably took me 20 tries just to get the curve of his head correct.

 From there I continued inking the rest of his body.  Since there will be a very strong light source (the light from Cyclops’ optic beams) I decided to stick with the heavy black areas.  

I also opted to have the regular line art on one layer, and keep the solid black areas on a separate layer.  I’ve found that using a lot of different layers is giving me a lot of options for different effects that I’m looking to do.  

After I finished inking Cyclops, I moved to Storm and Kitty Pryde. I knew that this would be tricky because it is two characters that are intertwined, so line weight was going to be very important in showing the delineation of the two characters. 

The great thing about this tablet is that it gives me a lot of control between light “brush strokes” and heavy ones.  It’s similar to when I was experimenting with brush inking back in high school.  But I don’t have to constantly re-dip the brush in the ink.  Using thin lines allowed me to add in a lot of detail to show that Kitty Pryde had been caught in an explosion (or something like that, it’s been a long time since I read the issue. All I remember is that Magneto was the one that injured her.)

For this image, I left in the whole background to give you a feeling of how I keep my Photoshop menus. I’m one of those people that always keeps my menus in the same place. I don’t understand how people can waste time looking around for their Layers palate or something like that.

Next time, I’ll get tackle Magneto. That’s where I’ll have to start drawing with the Wacom Tablet as opposed to just tracing my pencilled illustration.

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