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.