This one was a lot of fun to work on. I was asked to draw an image of Darkseid (a great comic book villain created by Jack Kirby) for a commissioned painting, and I decided to go for a big wide-angle close-up. After I thumbnailed it, I decided to paint the final for it really big, on a 22 inch piece of board so that I could get loose and have fun with the backgrounds. It was a delight to paint larger again, after months of working on smaller pieces and the whole process was quick and highly enjoyable. The painting was so big it wouldn't even fit on my large-format scanner, so I had to scan it in pieces and patch it back together to post here.
Incidentally, drawing the background for this piece reminded me of growing up in Hamilton, Ontario in the 80's. Back then Hamilton had 2 giant steel companies working full time, so I was used to seeing raging fires light up the night sky. It was always an awesome sight.
The final art was painted in gouache and ink, so it needed no photoshop cleanup. If you're interested in seeing the prep sketches for it, you can check them out below:
Here's my quick 10 minute colour thumbnail, which gave me the idea to paint it up nice and wide:
This is the pencil sketch for the piece, drawn at about 60% of painted size. I kept the background buildings and flying figures as just simple outlines, since I wanted to stay loose and do most of the "real" drawing in ink:
