Art Practice: Mike Mignola’s Hellboy (Part 1)

Back in 2007 (or was it 2006?), I picked up a copy of the Hellboy “Seed of Destruction” comic at Central Lending Public Library. And I was hooked. The illustrations and storylines simply blew me away. I was an instant fan.

There’s heavy use of shadows and contrast in Hellboy (lots of black).

At one page, I saw this particular panel and decided to use it as art practice. I took a digital photo for reference (From “Hell Boy: Seeds of Destruction” by Mike Mignola & John Byrne):

Sketched it on watercolour paper (not traced). It was a practice in observational skills:

When I was happy with the sketch, I proceeded to ink the outlines (alternating between Indian Ink applied with calligraphy pen, and a marker — in the end, I was happier with the Indian Ink as was more vibrant):

Here’s a shot of how I referred to the digital image (on a laptop) and inking on paper:

This is a scanned image of the completed outline in ink:

Then I filled in the spaces with more black:

Inking completed:

At this point, I wanted to apply watercolours, but I suddenly felt like doing the painting digitally. So I scanned in the image and retouched it in Photoshop by filling in with black and white (this definitely improved the picture in terms of smoothing out the uneven tones in the hand-coloured picture, and the black and white areas more defined):

Next: Part 2.

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