Hellboy 30th Anniversary

For Hellboy's 30th Anniversary, I was asked to contribute a piece of artwork for a gallery exhibition at the Copro Gallery in Sherman Oaks, CA to celebrate three decades of Mike Mignola's creation. I've been a fan of Hellboy since the 2nd issue (my local store at the time somehow didn't get enough copies of #1 and I had to hunt it down later) and I've credited Mike's time with Hellboy as a roadmap for my goals for a comics career.

A decade ago I did a 20th anniversary piece: http://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2014/03/hellboys-20th-anniversary.html. To the left you can see my final colored (just for fun) piece, and below I walk through the steps to creating it as well as showing the inks that will be in the gallery exhibition (and for sale) 

The process started with lots of ruminating over what do do with Hellboy. I've never drawn him for a cover, but between the 20th anniversary piece and the Kickstarter print for the Drawing Monsters Kickstarter I didn't want to repeat myself. I opted for an action pose (this is after discarding a very static sketch of Hellboy with animals from Mouse Guard while holding the Black Axe). I kept the Black Axe in this rough, but I drew and redrew a few variations of his surroundings with iterations of bone-dragon/snakes he was smashing apart before wanting to include a belltower I saw on my trip to Lake Como in May. The crumbling belltower drawing and Hellboy drawing were put together in Photoshop along with some blocked in color and a special clock-face with the hands at 30.

The above layout was printed and taped to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 14" x 17" sheet of bristol. On my Huion lightpad I was able to see through the bristol to use the layout as a guide to ink from. I used Copic Multiliner SP pens to ink with. 

Since the original inked artwork was the piece to be displayed in the gallery show, I focused on making it read clearly without color. That meant adding a lot of tone and texture to all the crumbling bits of tower stones, while leaving Hellboy rather clean line-wise. The framed original will be available for sale through the Copro Gallery.

Just for fun, I wanted to color the inks after I scanned them. It figured it would be good to see the piece in color again (the purpose of the layout's color blocking was to help me see forms as I inked; what was coat or right hand of doom, or stone or beam, or bell, or sky).

This first step of coloring is called 'flatting' and is basically a professional version of coloring-in-the-lines with flat colors to establish each area's base color. At this step I also added color holds (areas where I want the inkwork to be a color other than black) to the entire background as well as the numbers on the clock and the 'US' patch on Hellboy's holster.

Below you can see the finsihed just-for-fun colors (I never make prints of characters I don't have the right for). I did a lot more painting on this piece than my normal coloring process. Rather than using Doidge and burn tools for the majority of the rendering, I painted in shadows with the same color as the dark blue lines of the background, and added in highlights with a lighter warmer color.