The Shadow: Start to finish

Okay, here's the post I've been promising for a bit.  I recently did a sketch of THE SHADOW, which I then scanned in and colored.  I thought it might be interesting to do a step by step of how I got from beginning to end with it.  So without further ado.........

Quick note:  No matter what the piece is, or what it's for, I spend a little time in prayer before I start working.  I feel that as a Christian, all my talents come from God, and that no matter what I'm working on I should do it for HIS Glory!  So I pray that His will would be done with the piece, and that I would use His talents wisely.

You put the lime in the coconut..............Okay wrong thing.  First I sketched it in pencil, then inked it, then scanned it in as Grayscale at 300dpi (generic pro dpi.  Generally it's 300dpi for B&W or grayscaled work, 600+dpi for colored.  I always go 300dpi for my own work.  Cuts down on file size, and the pixelation isn't there as it would be with lower resolutions.)

This is the scan, after lowering the opacity down to I believe it was 40%.  You can see that at this stage when I saved the image, I was already beginning to block in some color.  When you work on a piece from B&W line art to color, it's usually good idea to lay in the flat colors first.  Flats are basically the easiest part, you just put down flat areas of colors that correspond to the item you're coloring.  In this instance it was a very dark brown for the trench coat.

Part of the problem I have with computer coloring is that my training as a classical illustrator kicks in.  I'm not used to working from dark to light, but instead the other way around.  In my painting class we were always taught to paint light first, then go dark as you're able to since with the physical paints and brushes it's always easier to darken than to lighten.  When you're working in Photoshop you don't have this problem, as it's equally easy to darken or lighten a piece.

I enlarged the image here a little bit to show a little bit more of what I was doing.  Here you can see that I have THE SHADOW pretty well blocked in.  The colors on his hat and coat, the gloves, face, and hair.  As well as beginning to flat color the scarf that always blocks the lower third to half of his face.  You will also notice that instead of covering all areas with the same shade of dark brown, I took a step backwards and placed the line art in a new layer above it, and set the layer mode to MULTIPLY.  This way I have the line art in front of me as well, for established light and shadow.  I've noticed that as I'm right handed, a lot of my shading tends to go from (in order of luminosity, dark to light) from right to left.  I put a lot of the heavier shadows on the right of the piece, and generally have my light source somewhere on the left.  It's a problem I've had over the years and that I'm working to correct.

Some colorists go into a piece without flatting first.  I'm one that always flats first, and again it harkens back to my training.  I feel that if you flat first, then it's easier to select a large area of color to play with it.  In this instance I could magic wand select the hat and nothing else, just based on the flat color.  Then I could play with the rendering on the hat without affecting any other portion of the picture.

At this point you can see that the flats are completely layed in.  It's time for the RENDERING to begin!

And what you have above is.......a mess.  I rendered the hat, the face, and the collars of his coat as well as portions of his gun.  I also put in a lighter tone in the non-shadowed areas of his coat.  If you look at the rendering of the hat, you can see that i used mainly the dodge, burn, and smudge tools to get the effects of rendering.  I'm not 100% sure I like doing things that way as you don't have the same amount of control as you would be using different shades of color.  I also began the rendering of the scarf .

At this point I had decided it would be better to have the line art in greater contrast to the color work, so I imported another layer of the first image (way above) and plunked it on a layer as multiply at 100% opacity.  Then upped the contrast a bit more to get a darker line, but there was a problem.......In the first image I was blocking in dark color over the line art, and forgot to save a line art only sample of my work.  So when I imported this line art over the colored/flatted work, I was stuck with a large dark area over his right hand (left hand side of piece, the hand not holding the gun.)  This meant that I had to go back in and replace the dark coloring with a gray tone in order to not lose as much of the piece in that area.

Here you can see the rendering had come a long way.  All using the dodge/burn tools and smudge.  I'm really not satisfied with the way those tools work together, so I'll probably go back to a more "painterly" approach in future works.  Using darker portions of paint to lighter in a gradient, and then using the smudge tool in order to work it into the shapes and designs that I need them to be.

Another note here is that it was pretty far along in the piece.  In fact, this is probably one of the longer pieces that I've worked on in the past few months taking over 8 hours from start to finish.

And above you have the finished piece.  Looking at it now I can see a number of areas where I should have spent longer, mainly in the right hand (left hand side of the piece, not holding gun) in relation to the background I chose.

I used a filter on the colored piece to roughen up the color a bit, then used a slight blur in areas that needed to dissipate a bit more gently.  I believe I used the built in rough pastel filter in Photoshop CS 2 for the main figure, then used a dry brush built in filter for the background.  I also used the built in lense flare tool to add the flare to the gun.

The background is an old stock photo I have of the hong kong city skyline at night.  Being the Shadow, I figured that Hong Kong would be a good backdrop to this piece.  I don't own the copyright to the photo, nor do I own the copyright to The Shadow, which is why I'm using this piece to teach as well as to explore different options that I myself have as a comic book artist.

I then took a blur tool set at 50% strength and went over the edges of THE SHADOW in order to make them softer.  When I first placed the skyline behind him, the stark rough contrast in lines from the Shadow to the skyline made it look half finished, like a pasted up piece that was done in a hurry.  I experimented with various different filters, including some of the Alien Skin Eye Candy ones, but decided finally to just blur the edges slightly to diffuse them.

Well, I hope you've enjoyed this quick trip down my artistic proclivities.  Remember, just because something works for me doesn't mean it'll work for you.  Save your work often and know that you can't break the piece irreparably in Photoshop as long as you have an older version set to go!  Experiment with the program, and with your skills.  Practice Practice Practice as Criss Angel says!