Thursday, August 07, 2008

Fear Agent back cover PT2

Remember a while back I posted I was working on a back cover for my pal's book, Fear Agent? Well, it's due and so I'm hard at work getting it done. Right now, I'm reworking the pencils after looking at the old roughs and deciding it was way too stiff and suffered from some drawing problems.



Anyway, here are some work in progress pics. As much as I feel silly posing for the ref, I decided to bite the bullet and give it a shot. Some old pulp cover artist I like used to do this kind of thing, so I figured if it's good enough for them....

Notice my son behind me trying to turn off the light.



Here's one of him trying to take the toy gun out of my hand so he can play with it ;)


I'm not using the photo as a guide for the drawing. In fact, it was the other way around. I used the old roughs as a guide for what I wanted, had my wife help light me the way I want for the painting, then take some pics. The pics will serve as a tonal guide, and nothing more. Even the colors will be made up later.



Here's some terrible pictures of the pencils, which are insanely rough right now. I'll tighten them up in the morning, and start painting this in black and white.



My plan is to then scan it, and add the color digitally in Photoshop mainly to save some time because I have to hand this in quickly.

Wish me luck.

Mike

4 comments:

Craig Zablo said...

It's always fun being able to watch an artist take us through the process as he/she creates a page. Please keep us in the loop!

PatrickWedge said...

Yeah, fully agree that the evolution of a page/cover is very interesting. If you didn't grab JG Jones 52 Cover book, he talks a lot about stuff like this, varying poses, using pulp references and influences.

Great stuff....now give your toy gun to your son. Let the boy play!!!

Mike Hawthorne said...

Ha! Thanks fellas! I promise to post the whole process from start to finish.

And, yeah, Mikey eventually got his hands on the gat! ;)

Mike

ljamal said...

Lil Mikey is a thug is training. You better watch him, he's already snatching gats.