So I was getting frustrated last night, trying to nail the composition of a piece I’m working on (so annoying not even being able to get the initial sketch stage done with). It’s a piece featuring Doctor Doom, focusing on his head and shoulders, arms raised aloft, harnessing some ball of energy or something. The initial idea was to do it in a very old school Jack Kirby style, lots of thick black lines and bold colours, and I was desperate to capture his mask, and the anger in his eyes beneath it. In the end, I did a quick, very close-up sketch of his mask in thick black lines, it looked really good, so I coloured it, added his eyes, took about forty minutes. I kept the brushes nice and big until I added some thinner lines and details later on, and stayed zoomed all the way out for the most part. Even though it’s clearly a quick sketch, I think it turned out quite nice.
The eyes are a bit far apart maybe, and the overall cohesiveness of the colours are well off, but it’s not bad. I’m having issues with colour in general at the moment, I can’t make things look real – I know I’ve been pretty much just drawing comic book characters recently, but I’d like to be able to make things look less comic-booky if I need to. Everything is just kind of primary, and the different colours look disjointed, if you know what I mean. There’s no overall coherency. The Thor canvas suffered from this, too many primary colours, not enough subtlety, but I have no idea how to rectify it.
I also had an idea of doing him with the Infinity Gems embedded in his gauntlet, close up on the hand and face, or mask, rather. I may still do this at some point, as drawing Doom is great fun, and I’d love to really go to town making the mask look metallic, and what you can see of his face underneath really soft and fleshy. His flowing robes are great too, he’s a really iconic character.
This was a nice little experiment though, it got me out of my mini-funk quite quickly, as I’ve now nailed the composition of the larger Doctor Doom piece, and am in a better, more positive mood overall.
