Hellboy painting for NYCC auction

New York Comic Con is this weekend at the Javits center and for their charity auction I've painted a Hellboy piece. The annual auction's proceeds benefit St. Jude Children's Hospital and to-date has raised over one and a half million dollars!

The auction will be held on Sat, Oct 10 from 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM in room 406.1
If you're at the convention, consider bidding on original artwork for the internationally recognized organization for its pioneering research and treatment of children with cancer and other catastrophic diseases. Your participation in this event will help support lifesaving research and treatment for the children of St. Jude.

Here is the final 10" x 16" painting, but below I'll walk through the process of creating it.

Originally the image I had in my mind was Hellboy emerging with a lantern from a mausoleum or crypt in an old cemetery. However, when looking for reference, I didn't find the right look –everything was too modern– and thought back to when I'd researched lych gates, which would have the right rustic vibe I was going for. 

I gathered some 3D model reference on a popular site for such things and rotated them until I got the angle I needed.  

At that point I'd already sketched Hellboy on copy paper in the position of holding his arm in a lantern-bearing posture. I added in the reference images and drew over them to simplify and refine them into linework that looks like my drawing style.

And because this was ultimately going to be a painting, I needed to color block the whole thing in to plan both for the colors but also the value structure (degrees of light and dark) of the piece.

The line you see in the sky is originally where the painting would have ended before I opted to trimmed my 16" x 20" illustration board in half to 10" x 16", which meant I needed the piece to go taller, so I digitally extended it (the moon was added then too)

With the layout printed out in a few sheets on my home printer, I transferred the drawing to the illustration board using transfer paper. The transfer paper is placed between the illustration board and the printout and when pressure is applied to the top when tracing over the lines the graphite on the transfer paper sticks to the board.

The rest is just painting layer after layer of watercolor to build up the value structure and get the colors right.

Below are a long series of process photos I took as I worked on this on and off for two days:

The last step was to reinforce my linework with a brown color pencil on Hellboy and a grey color pencil for the background.

Again, the original painting will be up for auction this Saturday at NYCC––happy bidding!