Supergirl 41

And here is the cover for Supergirl 41.

For whatever reason, the DC heroes always seem to beg for very saturated, pure colors. When I have tried to pull things back, it always looks odd to me, even though I often shy away from super-saturated colors in my other work. So once again, Supergirl and Superwoman are soaked with red and blue.

Something else to keep in mind about the covers I post here is that they are designed for print on a comic book, and as a result, they will never look as bright and shiny in the real world as they do on a glowing computer display. I have learned over the years to push the levels about 10% further than I think I should while working on the computer. By the time it sees print, it usually looks about right. Early on in my career, I was often frustrated that my printed work always seemed washed-out compared to what I was staring at in Photoshop. I didn't stop to consider the properties and limitations of ink on paper, just one potential pitfall of working digitally.

I suppose I could knock the saturation back just a touch on the JPEG's I post here to better approximate the printed look, or better yet, you folks can go buy the books!

Thanks for looking!

Joshua

Supergirl 39

This is the cover to issue 39 of Supergirl, featuring Reactron.

I wasn't sure how to go about rendering all of the metal, and wound up experimenting quite a bit. I started with a quick digital sketch as a foundation (which I used to get approval for the image from my editor) and made a new line drawing by tracing the rough sketch cleanly. I then shaded the line drawing by hand with some water-soluble graphite pencils, which I was able to blend with a clean wet brush. I also went in with some white paint to pull out some highlights. I scanned the gray "chrome" rendering back into the computer, placed it over my basic sketch, and tried several different blending modes to marry it with the base layer. It required quite a bit of brushing and smudging to look decent.

After a lot of playing around, I somehow arrived at this. I'm not sure if I pulled off exactly what I had in mind originally, and the metal is more convincing in some areas than others, but that's how it goes.

As soon as I finished this one, I went straight to work on another Supergirl cover, which I will post this weekend.

Thanks for stopping by.

Joshua