WIP! Making a cover for The Butterman

Looking back over the past year, I’ve done quite a bit of comics work. One of my favourite pieces was the cover for THE BUTTERMAN. So to finish out the year, I thought I’d post a quick work-in-progress of the illustration.

STEP 1: concept work. To start with, I had lots of different ideas. Amazing that I turned these into something coherent.

STEP 2: pencils. My pencil drawing over the past year has become much more open with less rendering. I’m really trying to focus on just getting the drawing right.

STEP 3: rendering test. This is pretty new and something that I started while working on the second issue of ANDREW JACKSON IN SPACE. I try to keep these tests super quick. They’re done on 8.5×11 paper with a sharpie, brush pen and micron pen. Mainly I’m just trying to get the lighting and the mood right.

STEP 4: inking in progress. I use a lot of different tools at this point. I mainly block everything out with a brush and pen first before jumping into the details and rendering.

STEP 5: final inks. Once everything is complete, I scan it into the computer and the clean everything up in Photoshop, plus add in some final details.

STEP 6: ink washes, halftones and effects. I’d always intended for this illustration to be dark and moody, so I added in the ink washes and halftones digitally once I’d cleaned everything up. Working from bluelines means added speed, but isn’t so great for adding in washes. So I’ve really started to do all of that digitally (everything was originally painted by me though).

STEP 7: final colours. I tried out a couple of different ideas, but settled on a simpler approach for the colours.

All in all, I love how this illustration turned out. The drawing was pretty spot on, I love the moody ink washes and the colours just add to the creepy factor!