Thor Pinup process

Here is a process of a Thor pinup I did early 2013.

I begin with a roughing out of the layout. I had the idea of doing a slight downshot with the wind swirling the dust around him and lifting up his cape. This usually involves me wandering around the image with my pencil, feeling out the general shapes. You can see this in the swirls of the cape and more generalized version of the forms.

 In this second sacn, you can see me adding more details and shapes as well as his costume. You will notice I tilted the head a bit so it feels a bit more natural. In the initial drawing, his head felt a little too tilted.

 This third scan shows more refining and rendering of the figure. In this image, I am figuring out more the directionality of the swirls. It's figuring how to keep the movement without driving the eye off the page. This is more compositional and partially established during the rough stage

 This scan shows the finished pencils. I left some of the plating because I knew I was going to ink this afterward.

 Here is a scan of the finished inks. The solid blacks give everything more weight. I blacked out the left thumb cause I didn't like how it popped out in the inked version. Also added the plating to the contours of the body. I made them smaller as per his comic costume. added some splatter to the background and feet area to give some texture. I believe in this case, I did that digitally in Photoshop. Sometimes I'll do it with white gouache.

Here is a gif of the process overlayed on top of each other.

The Morrigan gif

And here is the animated gif of it all together!

The Morrigan 8

Amazing colorist Juri Hayasaka colored this for me. and this is what she turned in.

 

In this image I tried tweaking the colors to see how the image would feel with a warmer feel. (She is a war deity after all) In the end, we went with the original blues.

I went over the image with a little color dodge in PS to bump up some highlights and add more of a glow to the magical runes. I also put a little more reflected blue onto the figure to bring the piece together. This was then cropped and sent off to be printed!

The Morrigan 7

Here is the final penciled version. In the computer I cleaned up the smudge marks and went over with color dodge to clean up some of the highlighting. I also put an overlay of runes (from a previous pic cause I didn't want to redo them). I kept the layer separate for the colorist so she can do some special effects for the final piece. Next: It's off to the colorist to be colored!

The Morrigan 6

Ok, almost there. I cleaned up the birds here and bumped up some details that can get lost through smudging or whatnot during the process, going in with a darker pencil in some areas to pull some details back out. This is probably the last thing I do on the original paper and then it's off to scanning and digital tweaks.

The Morrigan 5

Part 5. In this stage I worked out the birds in the background and the moon. Almost done!

The Morrigan 4

I suck at updating,(there are so many sites to keep up with) but here is a continuation of the Morrigan process. In this stage, I've smoothed out a bunch of the shadows and fine tuned a lot of the details, especially in the hair and textures in the bracers and skirt. I also finished off the left hand.