How to Draw the Fantastic Four
By now I’m sure everyone has seen the new Fantastic Four preview that hit the webs earlier this week. If not here it is. It reminded me that not to long ago for fun, and maybe for my portfolio, I inked and colored an illustration of The Fantastic Four.
First I had to find a cool Fantastic Four and I came across this one done by Ariel Padilla from 2009. I thought it was pretty cool so I got it.
After I got the image into Photoshop. I made a new layer set to Normal and then I used my Wacom Intuos to start inking it out. I used a combination of 3, 4, amd 5 point brushes and sometimes the paint bucket to digitally ink it. I made the luminous flame of Johnny Storm in this step as well.
Next it was time to color so I made a new layer and set it to Multiply so it wound’s mess with the black “inks” underneath. The first thing I did was make a purple to creamy yellowish color gradient. Purple and yellow are complimentary colors so they work well together. Once that was done I took the polygonal lasso o tool and made a kind of lightning pattern using the mouse and shift key simultaneously. Once the selection was finished I used the erase tool at 50% opacity and erased some of the background gradient. After that it was time to do the flat coloring for the figures. I wanted to make The Human Torch the light source for the illustration so I finished his whole character first. Then I colored all of Doctor Doom and the orange skin of The Thing. Once that was done I did all of the rest of the blues, then the skin tones, and then the white parts of their costumes. For the next step, shading and highlighting, I used two different tools. The first one I used was the Burn tool to make the shadows on everything. Finally I used the Dodge tool to make the highlights on everything. I like using the Burn and Dodge tools a lot. A lot of people on the other hand use darker and lighter shades and hues of the original flat colors.
After the coloring was done I wanted to have the name of the comic on it somewhere so I got a font from Dafont.com that closely resembled the original Fantastic Four. I opened the Photoshop file in Adobe Illustrator and then wrote The Fantastic Four. I then highlighted the text and made it a purple that I color picked from the background. Then I copy the text and made that text white. Then I put the white text on top of the purple in such a way as to mimic 3D in the same way as the original comics for the most part. Once that was done that’s all I was going to do so I put all of the parts of the illustration together in Photoshop as you can see below and that was that. I hope I have as much fun watching the movie as I did making this illustration and I’m pretty sure I will.
