Medusa

Queen Medusa, one of my favorite female Marvel characters.

I spent many months working sporadically on this piece, which I am hoping will be the first in a series of pin-up style illustrations of comic book heroines. My intent was of course to showcase her hair, which was a really fun thing for me to draw. The costume is my own design, though various elements are partly pulled from / inspired by past costumes of hers. In order to give her a slightly more regal look (instead of just being in basically a fancy bodysuit) I included the tiara and earrings which I based on Greek jewelry, as I felt that to be a nice pairing with the otherwise futuristic / outer space feel of the costume. If you look closely you can see some hints of her allegiance to her husband and king, Black Bolt!

I started this image with a graphite sketch which I used to get a feel for the form and gesture. I then scanned the drawing and inked it in Photoshop. I changed some elements from my initial sketch, such as the positioning of her left hand, which was originally angled toward her face. During this stage I worked out most of the costume details. When happy with the ink outlines I painted a solid cel-shaded look with Photoshop, using simply the pencil tool with no blurring of pixels. Of course there was a lot of push and pull with the colors, and adding or subtracting of certain elements to the drawing. The background I worked up based on some cosmic outer space reference, then used Illustrator to create a texture for the planets. The rest I did by hand using various gradations of color and different layer effects to achieve a glowing feel. Finally there was a lot of cleaning to do, such as adding highlights to the hair and costume, figuring out the final little details on the outfit, and a ton of redrawing in the face - somehow I just kept feeling like the eyes were not right.

I'm pretty happy with the final outcome and relieved to start on something new. She-Hulk is up next!