Green Lantern’s Unite!

Last week I talked about how to template your two page spread.  I talked about all the steps that you need to take to scan, art correct and create your spread into a DC Comics valid file according to their specs for interior comic book pages.  This week I wanted to share with you what it takes to draw one of those two page spreads that we use in comics every month in every book.

Far be it from me to use this space to shill my own work, but I am going to do just that!  I am very, VERY excited to premier my artwork for a two page spread of a Green Lantern piece I completed not too long ago.  I’ve been waiting for the right time to finally showcase this piece, and I felt it was the perfect time and place to do so, right here on Master Digital Color!  What started out as a simple pencil drawing of Hal Jordan of the Green Lantern Corps, blew up into a two page spread that included over 60 Green Lanterns into one 17 x 22 drawing.  Before being able to template a two page spread into a file, you need a fully drawn two page spread from an artist, right?  Well, below, I will show you my process for drawing this piece, and talk a little about each step.  I am very proud of this drawing for many reason, but mostly because double page spreads are not an easy thing to do, especially with the amount of characters I decided to include.  You’ve all seen the amazing work of George Perez, Phil Jimenez, Neil Adams, Art Adams, and Joe Madureira, and the amount of work they put into a spread, the amount of detail they are able to squeeze into it.  That is what I strive for in this piece, once I knew I wanted to take it to that level.  Enough talking though, let’s get right to it!

I started out wanting to draw a pin-up of Hal Jordan, Green Lantern.  The last couple of years, he has been the BEST superhero in comics because of the amazing writing of Geoff Johns.  All Green Lantern titles have jumped to the top of my reading list since Green Lantern Rebirth, and many people will say the same thing.  As usual with a pin-up, I had no set idea going into the drawing.  I just wanted to capture a nice gesture drawing, and go from there.  I always strive for making character pin-ups action oriented, and I try really hard to make a character doing something besides just standing there.  I try my hardest to convey motion and movement in my pin-ups, so the gesture drawing is very important!  Once i had that down, I started to finish the drawing, and add in the detail and shading.  Here is what I came up with for my Hal Jordan pin-up:

I was very happy with this drawing.  I felt I was able to capture the movement I wanted, and the expression I was going for, which is one of my main weaknesses as an artist.  I was very happy with the foreshortening of the arms, and just the ‘weight’ of the figure in space.  So I was done.  Not really.  Upon looking at the piece, I realized I should probably create a background for the piece.  Like I said, I just put pencil to paper and didn’t plan any of this out beforehand.  It was just a one-off pin-up, I thought.  But I figured I should  put some kind of background in there, because it seemed he was just floating there, mad at nothing in particular.  Didn’t make any sense.  I tried a couple of different things (outer space, training room), but nothing fit with the character.  That is one problem with not planning an entire piece out in your head before hand.  Not getting frustrated, I had the idea to draw Hal fighting someone instead.  Then maybe the background would take care of itself after that.  I decided on Sinestro, and tried to draw him somewhere on the page fighting Hal.  But I couldn’t fit him in anywhere that was cool enough to fit Hal’s positioning.  I took a break, to refresh (always a good idea when you are stuck on a drawing).  I took out a new sheet of paper when I came back to it, just try a couple of different ideas I got while away.  I came up with this drawing of Sinestro that I thought would fit well with Hal to make them fighting:

OK, success!  I think I got it.  But coming up with this idea, my juices were flowing and I began thinking of all these different things I could do.  Maybe even draw more characters fighting Sinestro, since he was now going to be a central figure in the foreground in front of Hal.  I started to sketch out an idea to have a couple of Green Lanterns fighting Sinestro, not just Hal.  I figured at this point, I was now working backwards, so I might as well do what I should have done in the beginning, and draw out a thumbnail.  Let me get the whole idea I now had in my head done in a quick 5 minute layout.  This is what I came up with:

I know you can barely see it, but the point is, I sketched out Sinestro in front, with Hal swinging his arm toward him, and sketched out two more lanterns next to Hal, Kyle, and Kilowog.  I hd my idea, and decided to get started drawing all the other pieces of it.  Since I drew Hal on a loose leaf paper in my sketchbook, I couldn’t fit any of the other characters on that page.  Sinestro was on his own sheet of paper now, so I started drawing the other characters on their own sheets of paper.  Believe me when I say this is an odd way of working.  I really don’t know anyone who works like this, in all my years in the industry and in college for that matter.  But it’s the strange way I work.  I know it’s not very logical or beneficial to work this way, because it’s always better to draw something as one whole image to get consistency and overall unity to the piece, but I’m kind of not a conventional artist n that sense.  My weird artist brain works in mysterious ways, and I can’t and don’t really want to understand it, so I just go with it.  So keeping that in mind, here is the drawing of Kilowog I did:

And of Kyle, plus two other characters I added:

So now I had all the pieces I wanted to have for this piece.  Now I was going to have to combine them, and make them into once piece making it Hal, Kyle and Kilowog verses Sinestro.  I didn’t do finished drawings of Kyle Kilowog or Sinestro, because I knew I would have to redraw them to combine them with the finished pencils of Hal that was already done.  That is why the others are just line drawings with no shading!  As I started to light box the other characters to the Hal piece, I realized that I needed not only a larger piece of paper, but that I needed to probably backtrack again, and just redo the whole piece to make it more unified.  I was getting very excited about this piece now, since it was all coming together better then I thought, that I didn’t mind that I would probably have to redraw Hal now.  Not a big deal.  As I grabbed a comic book art board to redraw the piece on quality paper and not loose leaf, I realized I can really make this into something cool, maybe even a two page spread.  But if I did that, I would have to draw a really cool background that stood up, because between the three characters and Sinestro I would have a lot of space.  But remember this Jim Lee spread he did for Trinity where he had about four characters on, he did this amazing outer space/ galaxy background that I loved, so I went for it.  Two page spread was on.  I light-boxed the figures where I wanted them on the spread (after cutting the boards according to my article last week on how to make a two page spread from our DC Comic Board), and re-drew them.  After I had the four characters drawn out where I wanted them, I had all this space for the background.  I took a break before I started the background I wanted, and when I did, I came up with the idea to add a couple of more Green Lanterns to the piece to get rid of all that negative space, because the background would be too big now that it was a two page spread.  So I went back to my drawing table, and pulled out the perfect Green Lantern Reference Guide, the Green Lantern/ Sinestro Corps Secret Files #1 issue that has over 200 Green Lantern’s profiled in it.  I flipped the pages and started to add in some of the characters I liked from the book.  I added one here, one there, one behind Kyle, one over Hal’s shoulder.  Before I knew it, I had like five or six more Green Lanterns added to the piece.  I liked where this was going.  I said to myself, hey, i can really make this include a LOT of lanterns.  That would be really cool!  So I did, and before I knew it, I had this:

It had about 35 Green Lantern’s now.  It was getting a little out of hand.  But the best part was, it all made sense to the piece, and I could still make a generic outer space background, just less of it because the characters were becoming the background now.  I continued drawing, and adding characters to it, all the while starting to shape the characters I had and start shading in and detailing the piece.  I kept drawing for what seemed like a week, but was only a few days, until I had over 60 Green Lanterns, and was well on my way to completing finished pencils!  I draw pretty heavy handed, so I usually fill in all blacks.  I don’t leave very much to the inker, because I usually ink myself, and like to see how it will look in “black”.  Finally I completed the pencils, and here it is:

Suffice to say I was very, VERY happy with what came out of this.  It was all a pretty happy accident, and actually worked out  way better then expected considering I planned NONE of this!  Now that I had the pencils drawn, I started thinking about inking the piece.  I kind of had no desire to ink it though, because I had just finished drawing the whole thing, and inking it would be a tough task to handle.  I’m not the best inker, so inking something like this would be quiet the challenge for me.  I decided to poke around and use my contacts to see if I can get a professional to ink it for me.  As I was looking for an inker I actually got a chance to show a lot of the DC editors the piece and even got to show Geoff Johns himself.  They all were really impressed with the piece which made me super happy!  To get the compliments I got from Geoff and the editors really pumped me up, and made it all worth the while.  But it also made me really want to complete the piece with inks AND colors.  I continued my search, until I convinced my coworker, and professional inker Mike Sellers to ink it.  Mike has inked some top notch professionals such as Steve Skroce, and Adam Kubert!  I was super excited he agreed to ink it and waited patiently for the finished piece.  After about two weeks, Mike was done, and I was blown away!  Here are his final inks:

After some tweaks in Photoshop (enlarging Kilowog to better represent his actual size), Mike kicked it outta the PARK!  I was so happy with the inks, and I can not thank him enough!  I added in some more stars to round out the background, and bing, bang boom, the spread was perfect!  Upon completion I could think of only one other thing to do, and that was to find a professional colorist now to color it.  I knew of only one person I wanted to do this.  I know a bunch of colorists from my work at DC Comics all these years, but one in particular jumped out at me. Brian Miller of HiFi, of this very website!  I wrote a letter to Brian explaining the piece, and asked if he would find the time to color it for me.  I have become great friends with Brian in the last year or so, especially since he asked me to contribute to this site.  Brian has been nothing but cordial and nothing short of a flat out inspiration to me.  He is a comic book making machine, and his colors are at the top of the industry.  I couldn’t believe he agreed to color the piece, and it is in his hands as of right now.  Since it is such a big piece, and he is beyond busy, I look forward to the day I wake up and he sends the finished colors in to me.  It will be one of the best days of my career when I see his amazing colors grace this piece!  I was lucky enough to get Mike Sellers to ink this baby, and to top it off with colors by HiFi Studios is a dream come true!  I am so grateful to both of these artists to contributing and I can never thank them enough!

When the final colors are completed I will debut them RIGHT HERE on this very site.  I hope you stay tuned and be on the look out for the piece, and I hope you enjoyed this little behind the scenes from me as a working artist, trying to complete a two page spread drawing.  As you can see, a lot of blood, sweat and tears go into these little drawings we call comic book pages, and I hope the next time you look at your comic book and the art inside, you appreciate what goes into making something like this.  This is just one large drawing, and comic artists around the world do this every month.  To them, I have the utmost respect and admiration for doing what they do, knowing how hard it is to make a quality, highly detailed image.

Until next time,

Corey Breen

PS- After the final inks were in, I templated the spread according to the DC specs on a double page spread, making sure it was just like the interior pages we receive from artists every day.  The final templated spread is what went to the colorist at the size of 13.487 x 10.438 at 600 dpi!

PPS- When the final colors are in and posted to the site, I will be making lithographs and posters, which will be available through me, Mike Sellers, and hopefully Brian Miller.  I will have some at cons, and available through my own website and blog at:

http://cjbpro.blogspot.com/