Savior Illustration: Great Escape

This is the first piece to promote my web comic, Savior: Fangs of the Reaper. The featured character is The Reaper. I love this illustration so much that I had to do variants. You can see those on my Flicker feed on the home page. This illustration is all about a sense of vertigo. Setting up the perspective was very tricky for this. Sure it's only one point perspective but I had to portray The Reaper running straight up a tower. After I nailed the sketch I just had to worry about the render.

I made a conscious decision to go for a Pop Art meets contemporary comics look. That means I used a soft brush to render light and shadow but I did not blend. Trying to approach my comics like my portraits is suicide. My comic panels need to be intricate but not impossible. I have to write, draw, ink and color btw. Thankfully I have colored him before. I added the old drawing to a separate layer and worked from that. I also had to consider all of the warm and cool colors in the piece. The blast is lighting him from behind and his front is shadowed by a pale purple. (Thank you painting class! ;)

I wasn't initially satisfied with the bricks on the front tower. They looked too flat for my taste. What I did was use a different brush to create a rocky texture on the bricks. The glow from the explosion was done with another brush with the opacity turned way down. (It was a trick I got from Francesco Salvatí on Flicker. He did the original splash page for Sketchbook Pro.) it feels good to be done with this illustration. On to the next one.

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Location:Blake St,New Haven,United States