I’m starting school tomorrow so I’m not sure what posting is going to look like for the next few weeks. I look at how much time I’m scheduled to be in class and it seems like I should have plenty of time for art, blog posting and doing all the exciting chores that life seems to require. But the last time I was in school was high school, many many years ago, and I’m told that college has a much different ratio of class time to homework time. Plus I’ve got a commute looks like it could run anyway from an hour to two hours depending on how smoothly I make my bus transfers.

So. Rather than post this sequence over a few days I’m putting it all up today. This was done for the current Remake/Remodel challenge at the Whitechapel Forums. Instead of giving us a brief character description Ellis posted this –

When I was a kid I watched some (perhaps all) of the Spectreman series on the Captain Cosmic show. I don’t really remember much about it. I think I found it somewhat disappointing but it did provide me with a giant monster fix so I caught as many episodes as I could.

Because this a giant monster fighting hero I felt compelled to add a contribution to the Whitechapel challenge. And because I’m currently in the middle of half a dozen other art projects (and school is looming) I felt equally compelled to get the illustration done as quickly as possible.

First I sketched out a logo. That will show up later. Then I sketched out a quick redesign of Spectreman. Quick. I added a random array of monsters behind him. Quickly. I inked the outlines of Spectreman. Quickly. Normally I like to fill in all the blacks of an illustration on paper but this time I decided to photoshop them.

Adding the spot blacks in Photoshop was faster than doing it via brush and ink but it’s not as relaxing. I know that these days a lot of artists do most of their work digitally but I still prefer to do most of mine on paper first. It’s more relaxing. (Unless I’m making a lot mistakes. In that case I find myself wishing I was working with Photoshop and its undo capabilities.)

I colorized the background to give me a base color to work with.

Next I selected and colorized the different shapes of the Spectreman figure.

I added the logo and matched its colors to Spectreman’s. In order to make the figure stand out from the background I changed the color from red to blue. And then I posted it to the forums before I could spend any more time noodling on it. And, man, do I want to noodle on this.

Ah well. Lots to do. I’ll post when I can.