Exploring a New Genre - Comics

prelim sketch - Luke Cage

Being an Artist is all about learning and growing and experimenting; it’s about taking risks with the reward of learning something new. Some time ago a family friend issued me a challenge and that was to create a custom comic book cover. Now admittedly, I had never drawn comics before but I have been a fan of super heroes in my lifetime so I said what the heck, why not. So recently, I began to break into this genre of art and with comics come a whole culture of creating. They are much more action/narrative driven where everything from the gestures to the line art has a significance to the story.

This week I’m working on that comic book cover and I think it’s coming along quite nicely. I’m in the process of familiarizing myself with the main character I’ll be illustrating and have begun the preliminary sketching. I’ve chosen to do the first sketch with my Wacom tablet in Photoshop. I can’t say exactly why I chose to go for the digital first but it may have something to do with the ease of use; pixels are cheap. So above you’ll find the first of many sketches I’ll do before I’m comfortable enough to draw on the comic book itself. The character: Luke Cage, his power is super strength and he is unbreakable. My challenges involve foreshortening and creating depth. This isn’t my typical face on portrait but I’ll use my knowledge of portraits to help my along the way. The overall goal is to create a really cool comic book cover by the end of this week.