BLART #1 Nick Fury

What's a BLART?  Why it's Blog Art of course.  There's a story to this, and we may as well get it out of the way.  My Brother is employed by comic book artist Antony Williams as an inker/colourist/odd job guy, and is also a member of the Swansea Comics Collective (SCC) - go take a look for more explanation.   This is based on the Comics TWART which is much the same thing, but with professional contributors and it's on Twitter rather than in a blog.  The SCC runs a fortnightly BLART for their blog, with a new subject every two weeks.  The subject could be anything (But tends toward the geek and comic) and the contributers have to draw something based on the current subject.  OK, cool, I decided to have a go, starting back at the very beginning.  Their first BLART was Nick Fury:

You'll likely want to click this one to enlarge it.

So that's the result. Would you like to know more? Of course you would or you'd have clicked off by now!

So, this all started as and idea for a picture featuring both the classic Nick Fury and the new Ultimate Nick Fury.  Once I had the idea I went and found a whole heap of reference images:

There were also some webcam shots of my hands in various positions since nick was reaching in a way I couldn't find a reference for.  This was followed up by a pencil sketch. Yes, real pencils; in fact only the colouring and cover treatment was done digitally, the pencils and inks are all old school and done on actual paper. I know, amazing right? Oh, yeah, pencils!

The rest of the progress pics will be smaller, but I liked how the pencils came out so you get a good look.  I've adjusted the contrast in Photoshop so you can actually see the pencil; if I put up an unaltered scan it just looks like a white sheet of paper - this is good when it comes to the inking, yes?  Inking:

I scanned every now and then to show a progression, but to be honest it's not as interesting as I thought it would be. Ah well. Here are the final inks, and the colouring, which I did in ArtRage over the scan of the finished Inks:

I wasn't totally happy with that, the background seemed really muddy to me, but I figured I'd come back and repaint it later. Turned out I didn't need to because while I was adding the rest of the treatment to make it look like a comic cover in Photoshop I accidentally inverted the colours, and that looked much better. So I isolated the two Nicks, inverted the background and overlayed a comic cover paper texture. Oh, and I got that by grabbing some white paper, stapling it like a comic book and just carrying it around with me for the day; the resulting crumples were both accurate and subtle when scanned. Result.

Anyway, you can see the finished piece at the top; but this doesn't give any idea of the scale of the original (image file, not the original inks, those are quite small). In order to get the early 90's printing look I had to work quite large, so he's a small piece of the cover at actual size (You may have to click to scale it right). Hope it was worth the wait.

I've already done the next BLART piece (X-Men's Jean Grey), so expect another post soon.