Aquaman Story - Page 1

I recently completed some new pages for the DC Talent Showcase submission and here is page 1. Last year I focused only on submitting a penciled work. I was always told to apply for what you want to showcase and work in. In the past I have tended to focus more on the components of a comic book illustration (penciling or inking) and practicing them individually. This year I decided to go ahead and do the whole thing.

Here is the completed first page. After the image, I'll walk you through the process that I used. But first, I have to give credit where it's due and that is to Kyle Webster for his awesome brush packs for the Adobe Suite. They can be found here. They are well worth your money and I have only begun to tap into their genius!

I wanted to convey a sense of depth with these images. I tried to make it so that object close to the waters surface had more color, and those that are further away turned more into the color of the water. I figured the deeper you would go the more blue-ish things would get. Also I wanted Aquaman's colors to stand out, both for focus and to imply that his suit had a bit of radiance to it.

So this is where I started. I made some story board images of the short story I had written. After I laid down my rough pencil layouts I started to block out colors with markers. Once I started coloring, I found that I tend to think more in colors from the start of the image making process. Inking is such an abstract concept to me, but coloring in stuff really help me understand the whole thing a lot better. Here are some of those sketches.

After that I penciled and inked it with a brush. Then plugged it into the computer and painted with Photoshop. This process worked for me and I will probably use it again in the future.