I’d normally just post an image like this one without much verbiage, but I went through some extra steps putting this one together, so I thought I’d do a “start to finish” entry on it since there’s maybe information that’ll come out of describing my methods here that could be of interest to folks.

Here’s how this all started out:  A week or so ago I got an email calling for folks attending Heroes Con 2009 comics convention to submit pinups for potential inclusion in the convention booklet.  Like any rational person, when I heard “pinup” and “comics convention,” I immediately thought of the ridiculous but also kind of cool (in a “shag carpets are actually kind of cool” way) Marvel B-string hero Razorback.  If’n you’re not in the know, Razorback is a minor superhero who appeared in a couple of Spider-Man issues in the 70s.  His real name was Buford Hollis and he spoke in CB lingo even when not talking on a CB, wore a giant electrified boar head on his own head, and had a “superpower” that enabled him to drive anything, including of course his own semi cab, the “Big Pig.”  He wore a giant electrofied boar head on his own head.  I just thought that deserved mentioning again.

Anyway, I really do like Razorback and I thought this’d be a good opportunity to work up a pinup of the character.  I figured, though, that maybe I could throw Spider-Man as well and I’d imagined a pretty simple composition, with Razorback in the lower right and Spider-Man swooping in in the top left:

(At this point I’d like to point out that normally I’d not be doing nearly this much work for a single image like this.  If this were just something that were going to be printed in a comic, I’d be doing most of the planning, revising and adjusting on the page.  This, though, is something I’m hoping to sell as an original, and when that’s the case I always try to have no visible evidence of planning or corrections on the bristol board, and certainly no non-photo blue pencil visible.)

So, I started by getting the image of Razorback himself together.  Here’s a a reference image and my first pass on the character:

(This is the early 90s John Byrne version of the character, where he’s all buff–not the original 70s version where he’s got a beer gut, but you get the idea.)

As you can see, I do a lot of correcting by drawing in different colors.  I think this is something I picked up when I worked very briefly in animation.  I start with light blue, then switch to orange, then red, and finally a regular old HB pencil.  This allows me to go over and over the image, gradually refining it.  You can see here, for example, how the position of his legs has changed substantially over the course of the process.  I can then use Image–>Adjustment–>Hue/Saturation in Photoshop to eliminate all but the pencil drawings by turning the lightness of reds, blues, cyans and magentas all up to 100%. ( If I didn’t need this to be drawn on bristol board, I could take this one step further by then changing the pencil drawing to non-photo blue, printing it out, inking directly on that, then scanning it and getting rid of the blue–leaving just the inked image.)

Then I moved on to Spider-Man.  Although it makes no sense chronologically, I decided I wanted to attempt a classic Steve Ditko “rubber leg” Spider-Man pose:

I wasn’t really very happy with this drawing, but I went ahead and started trying to get the two drawings laid out in a single composition in Photoshop… but, alas, nothing was coming together very well.  Given that I didn’t really like the Spider-Man image much anyway, I decided to ditch the whole original idea and instead just draw Razorback in front of his trusty semi cab, “The Big Pig.”  (I’m not making this stuff up, I promise.)

So, I just did a quick block-in of the Big Pig behind my original Razorback drawing:

Then, using a sheet of graphite transfer paper, I transferred the image to a nice clean sheet of bristol board and inked it.  Here’s the result.  Whether the folks at Heroes Con will be inclined to include something so silly in their convention booklet, I don’t know…