Here's a look behind how the cover of X-Men #8 was created (out in stores this week from Marvel Comics - written by Brian Wood with art by me, Rachel Dodson, Jason Keith and Barry Kitson).
The first step is to send in cover sketches to X-Men Editor Jeanine Schaeffer. The idea was to introduce Monet to the book.
Jeanine liked the idea of showing Monet's strength which I show in "C" but she suggested having her crush the "X-Men" logo - great idea.
My initial rough in of the pencils, drawn in Light Blue and HB lead on 12 x 18 Bristol Board.
It was decided to skip the other "X" characters as we we're really up against the deadline on this one.
I worked out the broken "X-Men" logo on tracing paper.
The final pencils which I gave to ….
Rachel Dodson to ink. Rachel's inks with a Windsor Newton Series 7 Kolinsky Sable #2 Brush and Higgins Black Magic ink, plus a little tech pen and croquille for the straight lines.
The art is then scanned and cleaned in Photoshop and then we go to color...
The first stage of coloring is to have the art "flatted".
Flatting allows the colorist to choose an area to color at any point throughout the coloring process.
Initial roughing in of color - I use Photoshop CS3 with a Wacom Intuos Graphics Tablet.
Added the "explosive" background in.
Have the character more accurately reflect the environment. I also began turning areas of the line art into color lines.
Cleaning up the background.
Adding shadows and highlights to the X-MEN logo and cast shadows and highlights on to Monet from the logo.
You can find this comic at your local comic book retailer
And digitally at
TD
Awesome, thanks for posting the breakdowns, Terry! Very inspirational! :D
ReplyDeleteCool, thanks!
DeleteCool :)
ReplyDeleteThanks!
DeleteHi! Thank you for sharing this stuff...
ReplyDeleteQuick question, how do you color some of your linework? I'd found a way to do this using layer masks, and wanted to see if there's a different method out there which might work better?
I do it on a separate layer.
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