This year is the ten year anniversary of the short story I did for Gotham Academy issue 17 titled 'Whatever Became of the Gilkey Warlocks". It was a tale about four friends at the boarding school who find a hidden room to play the RPG Serpents & Spells in 1984 during whatever the Bat-verse's version of the satanic-panic was. (past blogpost about the tale here:
http://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2016/04/gotham-academy-short.html)
As a fun exercise I decided to do character portraits of each of the Warlock's RPG personas since they were never seen in the story. For this post I'll be breaking down the art process for Glen Thomas's Serpents & Spells character: Avon Walker.
The Gilkey Warlocks are based on my friends and I back when we were younger and more active as RPG-ers. Glen Thomas is the Gotham version of my friend Jesse Glenn. His character Avon Walker (a name arrived at using a street he live on a a school he attended) is described as the 'wandering elven huntsman'. The animated shadow that specifically haunts Glen is an owlbear, so I opted for this ranger to have an owl as an animal companion.
I started with a few pencil sketches on copy paper that I scanned in to Photoshop and assembled before adding some color blocking to help me see the forms.
Like the original Gilkey Warlocks pages, I decided to do these in pencil. Though I did opt not to do as much rendering and tone to keep it less messy and quick since it's just a fun exercise. A printout of the color-blocked sketch was taped to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol and on my Huion lightpad I was able to do a clean drawing using a mechanical pencil with HB lead.
The shading and texture was added to certain areas like his cloak, belt, bracers, boots and bow. I did a bit more subtle rendering on the owl––which I drew while looking at photo reference and did my best to simplify as I interpreted it into a small pencil drawing.
With the drawing finished I scanned it into Photoshop to start the painting process. The first step of that is called 'flatting' where flat colors are laid in to establish all the color areas. On a more technical level, the pencils were on a layer set to multiply (which treats white as transparent, black as opaque and any % in between as that % of transparency) The colors were all put on a layer underneath that one.
Avon's colors were mostly picked to be standard ranger earth-tones clothing, but I went with a blue for the quilted tunic to honor Jesse's go-to identifying color (same reason Guardmouse Kenzie's cloak is blue).
For the final colors, I tinted the pencil art to be a warmer sepia and did some painting as well as some dodge and burn tool work (Photoshop's holdover tools from being a photography retouching program that allow over and under exposing areas with a brush) to render the forms and add highlights and shadows.
I may have spent more time on the owl and looking at reference while painting than I did rendering the rest of Avon's portrait.
That's the second Gilkey Warlock RPG character down––I'll share another in about a month's time...
