Captain Universe
Here's the original entry from "The Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe".
* * * * *
My next submission to the Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe: REDUX EDITION is Captain Universe. I always thought Captain Universe was visually interesting; I never saw him in a comic, but his entry in the OHotMU looked pretty cool. This time, I decided to do a more straight forward drawing, rather than a painting.
* * * * *
STEP ONE: I drew out the picture in the same general pose, but decided to go with a pose which was looking upward. I did several versions where the pose was nearly the same as Dikto's, looking at Captain Universe nearly straight on and eye level, but they all looked boring when I did it that way. This pose seemed to work a little better.
I pencilled it out on 8-1/2" x 11" cardstock, inked it with a few different brushes (mostly various No. 4 size synthetic brushes), then scanned it into PhotoShop. Hmmmm, I suppose I should have scanned in the pencils before I inked 'em. Oh, well. Maybe next time. :-)
* * * * *
STEP TWO: I colored all black lines dark cyan, except for the face. I grabbed a picture of a starfield from the NASA site and added it to a OVERLAY layer. All the dark cyan areas were filled with blue-colored stars. I erased the starfield over the body, just leaving the stars on the upper body/head region with stars.
I then added a MULTIPLY layer and colored the flesh-tone over the face. I also thought the original line for the chin was distracting and out of proportion, so I erased that out.
* * * * *
STEP THREE: I did the shading on his face and added/touched up some of the white highlights on his upper body. I considered doing all sorts of shading on the body and legs to make everything look more reflective, and additional white air-brush effects on the upper body/starfield (and did a little, too--see below). After noodling around with it for a while, I decided I liked it better without all the extra visual bells and whistles. So, in this case I left it as a more "clean" drawing.
* * * * *
This is a somewhat alternate version of the picture. I spent far too long trying to decide if I liked it better with some white, air-brush type effects along the edges of highlights on the upper body. In the end, I decided "less-is-more" and went with the more plain version. But, I thought I'd post this one, too.
* * * * *
This was done with brush and ink on 8-1/2" x 11" cardstock and digitally colored.
.
