Unwanted Valentines: Flex Mentallo

UNWANTED VALENTINES

Flex Mentallo

As it just so happened, iFanboy is having a contest to create comic book related Valentines.  Luckily, I had the Man-Thing Valentine chambered and ready to go and sent that one off right away.  I thought I would send along a second one featuring one of my FAVORITE characters in comics: Flex Mentallo, the Man of Muscle Mystery!  I've been a fan of Flex since he first showed up in Grant Morrison's run in Doom Patrol as a parody/satire of the classic Charles Atlas ads, and his 4 Issue Limited-Series by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely is in my Top 10 Favorite Comics of all time. 

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STEP ONE:  I penciled the image using a blue leaded pencil (the scan above is in gray-scale).  I was originally going to ink it with a brush and ink--that way, when I scanned it in, the inked lines would show up, but the blue lines would drop out.  But, then I got the idea to digitally ink half of the picture and then mirror the other half, which would work perfectly for this pose.  Also, as time was of the essence, I thought this would help me get it done quicker.  I'm sure it turned out the be the same amount of time either way.

So, I drew a divider line down the center of the page and penciled half of the pose.  I also included a three-quarter turned head just in case I wanted to make a slight change to the pose, figuring I could ink that separately and paste it over top if need be.  However, I think the original pose worked just fine... and I ran out of time for that, anyways.  Sigh...

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STEP TWO:  Here is the digitally inked layer.  I drew the left half of the image, copied it, and flipped it around so it mirrored the other half.  I had to rotate the halves of the picture a little bit to get them together properly, and there is a little something about the face which looks a bit like it was mirrored, but it generally worked pretty well.

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STEP THREE:  I created a new layer, digitally colored the drawing, and added the lettering.  I also changed his "Hero Halo" into a heart for the holiday.  Why not?  :-)  

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Blue line pencil on 8-1/2" x 11" paper, digitally inked and colored.

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