Above Metropolis

I found a sketch of superman in my images folder, i’m not sure who it was by, possibly Khary Randolph. Anyway I decided to color it in PSP using vectors. Picked out the best lines from the sketch and used bezier curves to ‘ink’ the drawing. I didn’t like the angle of the left hand (looking at the picture) hand or foot and so drew my own. Then picked my fill colors and line colors. The shadows are done with vectors also and set to multiply at 25%.

The pink sky background I found on google. I added the city skyline at the bottom using filled shapes to create the buildings and set it to soft-light. The superman logo at the back is my own vector one.

I like how it turned out, a sort of retro animation feel.

Green Lantern: There Can Be Only One

I saw this base image of an underwear model and I thought with this pose he might make a good John Stewart GL. And then I had the idea that for some reason he has ended up with two power rings (a fellow Green Lantern was killed in whatever battle this was and John took the ring rather than it fall to enemy hands) Anyways that’s what I thought. This is another of me trying to keep my hand in until I get really inspired. Lots of smoothing and smudging on the costume, think it turned out quite nice. The planet background I had downloaded from somewhere but recolored it here. The dirty green interlocking tile texture is one of my own made from multiple source materials.

Believe! Superman/Superboy Concept

Just keeping my hand in with manipping really. Here we have Marcus Schenkenberg (whom I’ve used before – see my ‘Blink’ piece) as a younger Man (Boy?) of Steel.

Had to do a fair bit of cleaning up on the original image as there was a lot of text to remove. The costume was made by first creating a composite texture made up from three separate elements – leather, faux suede, and chainmail (much reduced in size) – to try and give it some texture (similar to spidey’s movie costume which I love the texture on the blue sections) Then I created a layer to apply the texture. Using the lasso tool to create appropriate areas, the texture is applied at various angles to match the body shape at that area. I then mask of the extra leaving the areas that would be the suit. Using the same mask I duplicate the original model layer, tweaking the muscles and smoothing/smudging where necessary. this layer is then duplicated again with the original layer’s mode was set to multiply and the second layer’s mode set overlay.

The logo was created from scratch in vectors a while back for another project, simply here reduced and distorted to fit the chest then used to create selections to apply the soft embossed feel. I tried to give the cape a believable flowing feel, not sure if I did, but I like how it turned out. It started with a solid block of color on a layer behind supes. Using the lasso tool I created gradually darker blocks of the red (using HSL adjustment) to give the feel of folds in the cape. The same method used to create supes shadow on the cape. Then used free hand soften tool to blend all the shades together. Over the whole lot applied a gradient fill to darken the cape further where it curves over the shoulder to light at the bottom.

The actual shoulder pieces are on a layer to the front of supes, again beginning with a couple of solid blocks of color. Used gradients, the lasso and HSL to create the tighter folds and wrinkles (where it’s stitched/joined to the costume). Over the whole lot I introduced some granularity. This had the effect of giving the cape some texture post smoothing. blended in the flag in the background to further enhance the ‘belief in something larger than yourself’ feel.