This entry brought to you by the Wacom Tablet ™
My son loves the Justice League like you wouldn’t believe. So one of the “father and son bonding activities” we do is take extreme close-up photos of his 4.5-inch Justice League collection. Here’s one such image.
To get myself used to drawing with the Wacom tablet, I put this image into Photoshop, added a “new layer” and simply traced over it with the Wacom tablet. There’s a trick to getting used to the stylus, since you’re not drawing directly to paper. There’s a weird hand-eye thing that you have to acclimate to.
To give it the feeling of a spontaneous drawing, I limited my “tools” to the Photoshop “pencil” tool and kept it at the same pixel-breadth throughout. That gave me the same limitation as though I had only a piece of paper and, say, a warm, fat grease pencil (which is exactly what the stylus feels like on the tablet surface. I also tried to limit the amount of erasure and keep myself to the kind of marks I would make if I were “live” in art class instead of working with an infinitely malleable digital artwork.
When I felt like the drawing was done, I saved only the top layer and voila! Hawkgirl!
Click for larger view. For those blessed with Firefox, MUCH larger view.
And, using the same technique, here is ol’ gloomy-puss himself, Martian Manhunter:
