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Sunday, April 14, 2013

Mighty Monocle Fan Art Process



This week's fan art exchange over at my award-nominated (never get tired of saying that) webcomic, Untold Tales of Bigfoot was with D.M. Rolfe, a cartoonist who resides in the U.K. Rolfe is the creator behind The Mighty Monocle, a comic about a humorous superhero who protects Great Britain. Rolfe did this awesome Bigfoot gag for me. In response, I created this fan art tribute to Rolfe's character, made to look like an old, worn comic magazine from the '70s. To see how I put it together, you can scroll through the steps below.  


The pencils. Rolfe's comic is done in the classic 3 panel format. But I wanted to take his heroes and re-envision them as caped crusaders of the silver age. So there they are, leaping before they look, in a classic superhero pose. 

Once the pencils are scanned into Photoshop, I ink them. Since I want this to look like the splash page from a comic book, I use some traditional comic book fonts to create a masthead and title blurb. Rolfe's comic is mostly a black-and-white affair, and I wanted to continue that tradition with my fan art. So, next step, toning.  

Here I used just a few greyscale values to give a sense of depth, and also drop in a few subtle textures to dress it up. One more thing I did was to run a halftone filter over the whole thing to make it look like it was run off on a traditional press. Beyond that, in order to age it, I ended up tinting the whole thing with a stale yellow and, finally, overlaying a photo texture of an old comic book binding (image up top). And that's that! It looks so vintage you can almost smell it!

After you're done smelling your computer screen, point your noses over to Rolfe's webcomic, The Mighty Monocle, and enjoy his classic cartooning and silly sense of humor. -v

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