Gold Iron-Man helmet

Working with lighting - absorption, refraction, reflection - on metals.
Gold is... interesting. It absorbs light, but reflects more than enough to be able to have a mirror-esque finish. Soft and malleable, easily dulled and dented, but capable of a fine shine.

These may look "okay" at a casual glance, and maybe I'm my own worst critique
[no internet, that is not a challenge], but there's something about these that doesn't feel right to me, and I'm not sure what. Going to try and get one more attempt done before class tomorrow, maybe finally nail it down.

This is shading with colours, instead of lightening or darkening an already coloured section.

And this is using the lighten / shadow brush in MS5.  The shadow brush takes a really light touch to us it without 'burning' the colour.

Update:

A 3rd attempt - about 50% done, ran out of time before class [and dinner].  I like this one much better, but it's still not where I want it to be [but I think I may have found some brushes that'll get me closer to it]

]EDIT[

Here's the 3rd attempt - finished.

Skullkickers colours

Via the wonder of twitter, I saw a link from Jim Zub to some line art for his fun-to-read comic SkullKickers.

So I snagged the made-available [here] line art and spent some [very distracted] time doing this to it:

And in case you're wondering, oh yeah, I borked the booboojeebies out of this.
My light sources are wrong, my shading went off the rails.
This is not quality work. This makes me mad at myself. I need to do this again and do it right.

Here's my flats - no major issues with them, but I completely demolished the highlights, shadows, lighting, contours and depth.

Mjolnir Homework for ComicExperience

So, this is my homework for the Intro to Digital Painting course taught by the amazing Scott Johnson.

Not familiar with his work? Google-image "Palladium books" or "Rifts RPG" He painted up some of those covers, notably the shiny armour ones.

Anyhow.. homework was to pain Mjolnir.  I managed to squeeze this out in the 3 & 1/2 hours I was listening to Lar de Souza's ustream. Done in Manga Studio 5 with a variety of brushes.

It was supposed to just be the hammer - painting planes and angles without lineart, but I couldn't help but add some effects.

Here's Mjolnir without the effects.

A Mustachioed Menace

I blame/thank Paul Tobin for the idea:

What if: Galactus had a mustache?

After some google-image searching, I've come to the conclusion that Galactus' helmet has a few commonalities, and a lot of other decorative stuff that's up to the artists' discretion. So I kept it pretty simple for this, though I do want to spend some time just going to town on it [the helmet] in the future. 

I know the Avenger's movie franchise is taking aim at Thanos... and I [personally] would love to see a bit of "here's how bad/powerful our villain is" with an opening scene/credits bit of Thanos knocking Galactus around.  He's done it in the comics, let's see him do it on the big screen before the Avengers come to save us all.

And then, of course, because I can - I made Paul Tobin a World Devourer:

Made a few changes to help balance the photo over/under the drawn aspects.
I like the eyes & cosmic eye-...smoke? leaking power? whatever? in this more than the first.