"Old School" mash-up

Inspiration strikes in the shower, right?
That's the cliche`, anyhow. I figure it's more that you're focused on a mundane task, and your brain is free to wander - without the usual forced-to-wander kind of creative thing going on. Like a puppy let loose in a field, as opposed to a fenced-in park.

I had a fleeting thought about that Muppets art collaboration thing [that I didn't get in on], and then soap in my eye, and then this is what hit me in the shower.

Fantastic Four page - coloured

Aaand here's the flats all coloured up.

Initially saved as a 17meg+ jpg, I resized it down to about 130kb. Gotta love Irfanview.

So the costumes are different from the norm, or any of the redesigns I'm aware of [all-white with some black, and red & black].  I think it works okay - not great or amazing, but it works okay.

The Thing is often orange-y/brown..supposed to be all rock-like. So I spatter-flecked him out with some lighter & darker shades ...pondered trying some marble-style vein/slash designs but it just didn't look good.

Johnny's almost always on fire.. so that's half the team being red[ish] / hot coloured.... and they also tend to be the hot-heads. [moreso Johnny than Ben].

Sue and Reed are the scientists of the team.. so I kept their costumes similar to help balance against the reds/oranges.  Sue's a biologist if I remember right, and would know the value of letting your skin breathe. Yeah, Reed designed the costumes out of ...unstable molecules?... so I'm sure it breathes better than cotton, but nothing breathes as easy as no impediments at all.

Anyhow.. team balance, brains & brawn.. blues and reds.

Fantastic Four page

I don't know about you, but FF means Final Fantasy to me.. probably because I've never been a fan of the Fantastic Four.

There's no script with this bunch of assorted Marvel pages, so I'm just winging it here, feeling a bit adventurous. Also playing with a lot of blue here.

Work in progress - flats.

Something old, Something new

So I bought a few more brushes that Ray Frenden's created. I have a hard time understanding how artists and colourists - any creative individual, really - are still working in Photoshop.  Manga Studio is a much more natural art program to work - a better ability to replicate real-world brushes and set up pages and such for printing in an easy-to-see / understand method.

Why am I so pro-Manga Studio? is it because Adobe screwed me out of my investment into their Creative Suite 3? No. ...I am still sore about that, coming on almost 7 years now.  But it's the fact that this is a program designed for people who draw, who create... whereas Photoshop's options often seemed like they were jammed in as afterthoughts or half-hearted appeasements.

Back to the point: I got playing with Frenden's Wash Brushes.. and figured what better subject than to remake an old Fallout Super-Mutant quick sketch I did a few years back. For those not familiar, the Fallout World is post-nuclear-apocalypse.  Think the version of the future envisioned by 1950s/60s sci-fi and fantasy.

But with no running water, and most of the water being radioactive, you can imagine the layers of grime one would accumulate whilst traipsing about the new-but-broken world.

Remember now - this is a recreation, not just colouring old lines, so there'll be some differences.

Original:

Coloured using Frenden's brushes - his Wash set, various Pencils and Ink Nib 2 and the Feather Fawcett ink brush.