Anyway, I really do<\/em> like Razorback and I thought this’d be a good opportunity to work up a pinup of the character.\u00a0 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:<\/p>\n (At this point I’d like to point out that normally I’d not be doing nearly<\/em> this much work for a single image like this.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.)<\/p>\n So, I started by getting the image of Razorback himself together.\u00a0 Here’s a a reference image and my first pass on the character:<\/p>\n (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.)<\/p>\n As you can see, I do a lot of correcting by drawing in different colors.\u00a0 I think this is something I picked up when I worked very briefly in animation.\u00a0 I start with light blue, then switch to orange, then red, and finally a regular old HB pencil.\u00a0 This allows me to go over and over the image, gradually refining it.\u00a0 You can see here, for example, how the position of his legs has changed substantially over the course of the process.\u00a0 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<\/em>, then scanning it and getting rid of the blue–leaving just the inked image.)<\/p>\n Then I moved on to Spider-Man.\u00a0 Although it makes no sense chronologically, I decided I wanted to attempt a classic Steve Ditko “rubber leg” Spider-Man pose:<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 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.”\u00a0 (I’m not making this stuff up, I promise.)<\/p>\n So, I just did a quick block-in of the Big Pig behind my original Razorback drawing:<\/p>\n Then, using a sheet of graphite transfer paper<\/a>, I transferred the image to a nice clean sheet of bristol board and inked it.\u00a0 Here’s the result.\u00a0 Whether the folks at Heroes Con will be inclined to include something so silly in their convention booklet, I don’t know…<\/p>\n![\"razor_sketch\"](\"http:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/uploads\/2009\/04\/razor_sketch.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"200px-razorback_001\"](\"http:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/uploads\/2009\/04\/200px-razorback_001.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"razor_1\"](\"http:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/uploads\/2009\/04\/razor_1.thumbnail.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"spiderman\"](\"http:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/uploads\/2009\/04\/spiderman.thumbnail.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"razorback8\"](\"http:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/uploads\/2009\/04\/razorback8.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"razor_pencil\"](\"http:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/uploads\/2009\/04\/razor_pencil.thumbnail.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
![\"razorback\"](\"http:\/\/www.benzilla.com\/uploads\/2009\/04\/razorback.thumbnail.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"