exurban

I’ve really been inspired by James White‘s do cool stuff and put it out their approach; a thing I feel like I’ve ignored for too long in my career. I have also been inspired by two designers doing great series work; Simony Birky-Hartmann and PJ Tierney.

Wanting a cool project that I could use to work in on drawing and software skills, but would be a lot of fun to do, I decided to combine two of my favorite things; Modernist design (specifically Erik Nitsche’s work for General Dynamics) and Iron Man. You could even argue that Iron Man is a Modernist superhero, although I’m going to do that here.

This ended up being relatively simple but there were a few wrinkles.

I started out doing thumbnail sketches for overall layouts.

Eventually going with this basic concept:

I say basic, because when working on personal projects, I tend not to take my own art direction that rigidly. A lot of what I end up doing ends up falling into the ‘learning/happy accident’ category. My goal here is to create a design that is evocative of a style. If it succeeds then it’s not personally important to me that I have done things like change the character’s pose as I’m working.

The next step was building Iron Man himself. I did a more refined rough that would give me positioning:

In creating artwork like this, I still prefer to rough things out by hand, scan them and then trace and do refined drawing in Illustrator. I ended up changing the pose because I couldn’t nail the arm up one in the thumbnail.

I am a big fan of online tips and tutorials. Drawing this figure I decided to shade him with a technique I read about. You simply create a shape with a gradient, apply a Grain effect and set the transparency to Multiply. I thought this would be really effective for getting the look I wanted and I was right, but it did get me into serious trouble.

One of the things that has struck me as funny about the progression of Adobe Creative Suite is the ‘feature creep’ between programs. You can do raster effects in Illustrator and make vectors in Photoshop now, which is still strange to me. I actually ended up building the whole of the poster in Illustrator. I have a bias toward it as my preferred working environment. What happened is I created a file that was too complex to edit and ultimately, even open once closed. It seems to me that Illustrator is generating the grain effect in real time, which just ended up killing my computer when it tried to reopen the file. The moral, never send Illustrator to Photoshop’s job.

Click through this one to see full size detail.

Really I think the piece ended up better for it, I made a few other moves in PSD that I couldn’t have made in Illustrator and it really brought the whole thing together.

And thanks to Matt Hine for the Goode Projection world map, couldn’t find one on any stock site.

Iron Man © Marvel Comics

- Jayson