Starting work on Tony.



I'm wondering about how the silver trim on the entire suit is what is causing the dissonance with this design...the gold being trimmed by silver gives it a very washed-out look, which isn't doing the gold design any favours. I have a feeling that I'll be darkening the silver to give the figure more weight, but I dunno just yet. I've made the silver very dark here just to keep that layer visibly different from the helicarrier behind him, but it seems to already be working for me better than the stand-up at SDCC...

Work on the abs now.



A couple things to note. First, these are most certainly not the colours I'll be using when I go to the actual modeling stage. I'm just dropping in different shades of yellow to indicate where the gold will be painted, but the different shades each mean different layers.

Secondly, I'm drawing all of these selections with the airbrush tool, using a hard-edged brush, and then filling in that selection afterward with the magic wand (usually expanding that selection by 5 or 6 pixels so there is no gap between the original selection line and the bit in the middle). This makes all of the selections slightly fuzzy and more natural looking in the final painting.

yah, all these little details are pretty tedious...



Currently, I'm sitting at sixty-three layers...and I still have one arm and one leg left to flat...

Very cool so far.

Loving this Ian, it's been far too long

Thanks for all the support, folks - I really appreciate it

Okay, all the basic flatting is now done:



Usually I start by painting the background and working my way forward...I'm probably going to do that here, but I'll leave it for a bit before deciding on that.

[whine]Why isn't it done yet?[/whine]

Starting in on the clouds in the background.



In the background layer, I dropped in a simple grad, using a darker blue at the top, going to a much lighter blue. Then, I started working on the cloud layer on a separate layer. I think I'll be putting in another cloud layer over the helicarrier, having the carrier flying out of the clouds.

The basic painting on the helicarrier is done.



The helicarrier will be more detailed later - I want to get the second cloud bank completed before I go back and see how much detailing needs to be done. The underside of the landing strips is a bit underdeveloped, so I will need to still touch that up quite a bit, but, again, it will be easier to see what all it needs once the foreground cloud bank is done.

NOW it's getting to where I'm liking it.



Let's see...I've added a bit of internal modeling inside the big main windows to add some depth, dropped in some highlights to the helicarrier to further bring all the separate elements together, applied a blue gradient to the entire scene to push it further into the background for even more depth, and then painted some middle-ground clouds into the bottom. I won't say I'm completely done futzing around with the helicarrier just yet, but it's done enough that I can begin work on Tony.

What type of brushes are you using for clouds ?

All of my brushes are custom-made ones, most of which I made myself. The ones I'm using for clouds are these two here:



The paintbrush is set to 100%, with both size and opacity clicked on. I'll use a few different brushes here and there, but the majority of the modeling was done with those two.

And I'm up to ninety-four layers...I should be able to keep it under one hundred, though....hopefully.

Modeling done on Tony's right leg.



I realize that I have one detail wrong on the leg, so I will probably correct the plate later. The colours seem to be coming together okay, here, and I like how the lighting is working at this point.

Now I've got Tony's torso and helmet done.



I'll probably end up tweaking the faceplate a bit more, but I'll leave that until after the effects are dropped in.

Pretty neat... I've been considering switching to digital drawing, as it'd be a lot easier to fix mistakes.

What drawing tool are you using?

All the drawing is done with the paintbrush tool in Photoshop.

I mean, you use a Wacom, right? What kind?

Ah, yes, right - I use a Graphire 2, but those aren't being made anymore. Miss Potts just got the cheapest Bamboo model, the Bamboo Splash, and it seems to be about equivalent.

Moving along, I just have the left leg (and effects) left to paint.



For those of you interested in this sort of thing, I spend most of the time drawing and painting this listening to podcasts about movies - Radiodrome, The Projection Booth, and the new one with fellow IMWANker, Zaki, http://moviefilmpodcast.podbean.com/

This doesn't look anything like Paste-Pot-Pete.

Iron Man is completed!



Oof. That modeling took a while.

I'm finding that this armour design, with the tweak to the colours that I'm doing, looks more like some sort of rescue apparel rather than a combat unit...it must be reminding me of some fire fighting equipment used by European airports or something.