Handbook of the Marvel Universe: Captain Universe

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.

.