Character Art- EPIC from Dark City Comics

After reading about my Custom Art Sale on Facebook, Lonnie Lowe Jr. of Dark City Comics reached out to me to do a drawing of his character, Epic. 



Epic (rough). #2 wooden pencil
He wanted a drawing of Epic shooting eyebeams. I did a bunch of sketches from different angles that I wasn't happy with before I got to this one. The character's cape bunches up around his neck in a distinctive way in the original design, concealing part of his face. I wanted to draw emotion on the face, but part of his grill would be obscured by his costume, and more by the effect of the eyebeams, so I needed to work that out to get it right. After a bunch of uninspired compositions, I really liked this one.

Epic (inks) Sharpies, water based brush marker
So I light-boxed this onto some 110 lb Wausau paper I bought today. Because the pencil rough was well-composed, this was pretty straight-forward. I didn't need to change anything other than to define the gauntlet that is showing there. I could pretty much "see" the inks I wanted to lay down when I was drawing the sketch, which is why I didn't tighten it up at all in the pencil stage. I think it helps the inks have the right amount of freshness and bounce to them, instead of just tracing a finished pencil drawing.
Epic by Samax Amen
After looking at the piece on the blog preview, I went back and drew in some more hair and darkened some of the grays. NOW I'm happy with it! I guess it's important to note that while I usually draw with colored markers then desaturate the image to get my "inked" images (cause that's how I roll), I decided to draw this one in straight black and white since the customer was buying the original, not a print. That's also why there's none of the halftone screen/zipitone effect I am so fond of. I just laid in the grays with a gray bush marker. So there's no photshoppery on this one.

So that's that. Interested in getting a piece of your own? Click here for details on my Custom Art Sale!
-samax

3 comments:

corance said...

Great work, Samax. I like the eye beams, themselves. They look really powerful.

That gauntlet is dope, too.

Dark City Comics said...

Amazing work fam.

Samax said...

Thanks, guys! Hopefully I'll get more commissions (bills, bills, bills)!

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