Friday, May 01, 2009

Beta Ray Bill

I'm waiting to hear back from an editor about a big project at the moment, so in the meantime, I've had some, well, time. And time off is always a good opportunity to experiment! This pic isn't a huge departure from my current method, but I did try a couple of new things.

The character, Beta Ray Bill, is a pretty obscure dude from Thor comics. He's basically an alien who's a convert to Thor's religion, and was so badass that Odin awarded him his own hammer. To be honest, the original reason I did this drawing was to make up for a terrible con sketch I did of Beta Ray Bill, which I occasionally come across when someone visits my website through the link. I ended up liking the drawing enough to finish it off as an illustration.

Stylistically, the main thing I was trying here was an overlaying texture to make the drawing feel more like it's printed on newsprint. You can see it much better in this detail, where you can see it looks like some of the paper is coming through.

Lastly, for what it's worth, I thought I'd include the original ink drawing. I think I did a decent job with the lineweights (I did it pretty quickly, like just under two hours from start to finish), and the colour kind of obscures that.

So there you have it. Beta Ray Bill!