Golden Age Sandman

I'll be signing and sketching this weekend at the Wild Pig grand opening in Kenilworth, NJ!  Come by and say hi if you're in the area!.

Anyways the owner of Wild Pig and organiser of the event had asked for a commission. I've been extremely busy with Star Trek/Doctor Who pages lately and haven't really been doing commissions, but when he told me what he wanted, I jumped on it.

Golden Age Sandman!!

This is visually one of my favourite characters and he looks great in B&W.
I decided to do the whole thing in ink wash.

Materials:

This is everything I used.

mechanical pencil. gum eraser. Higgins black ink. 2 sable hair #8 brushes(1 new for fine line work and 1 old and a bit beat up, used for broad shading and fillin blacks.

The paper I prefer is Arches. It's around $60 for this pad, but well worth it. 20 sheets of cold pressed, 100% cotton, 140lb, 18" x 24".
I generally cut the page in half to give me 2 12" x 18" pieces. Perfect size for comic book pages.

I start by sketching on the much cheaper 8.5" x 11" printer paper.

 I later project this image on the larger paper and retrace only the lines I want. This gives me a much cleaner image on the watercolour paper to paint from.

 Now I roll the gum eraser gently over the pencil lines.

This give you a lighter image that won't show through some of the more translucent ink wash.

 Now I mask the edges to get a clean frame for the image.

 now I start with filling in the background blacks using the older brush so as not to wear out the fine point on the new brush which will be needed for the detail work

 I generally try to complete the backgrounds first, knowing that I'll spill into the foreground character a bit, knowing that I can later clean it up.

 I use the new #8 sable hair brush for the high rise detail work.

 city close up.

 gas gun close up

 Again I use the new brush with the refined point for detail work on the mask. I then bring in the old brush with an ink and water mix to add the grey brush stokes for shading.

 I use the same ink/water mix over the the other brush strokes when they've dried. Because the ink water mix is translucent, adding another coat over the old, makes the brush stroke darker.

  I keep using this layering technique over and over again in the spots where I want darker shadows. That's how you get the variance in the depths of the shadows.

 gas mask close up

 I use this method with the old brush to finish up the jacket.

You'll also notice I removed part of the masking so that I could finish up the gun which overlaps the border.

My favourite part! removing the masking and truly seeing the work for the first time. of course the ink gives off that very distracting glare in photos, so ....

here it is scanned in.