Get Deathly

I can't really imagine a better bill for a Metal Dude. I mean, I almost can't imagine a better bill. It's Tryptikon (from Zurich featuring members of Celtic Frost/Hellhammer), 1349, and Chicago's invincible Yakuza. Seriously, I saw Yakuza a couple years ago, and it was pretty goddammotherfucking awesome. Not to be missed!



Here's the line art, that's a statue of Saint Bruno, which I didn't really choose for any real reason other than the way it looked. There's a skull, and a cherub scaring him with a scroll! The Chalice of Doom, I used because it's fun to draw. Also, I'm kind of ripping off Mike Mignola's design moves that he uses pretty much for every cover of anything he draws a cover for, but especially the Hellboy books. I do this out of pure love though, in all seriousness, I've posted about my love for Hellboy comics in the past. If anything, after the last few Hellboy series (Darkness Calls, The Wild Hunt and The Storm), it's only gotten crazier, more vehement.

At any rate, I posted the rough of that Warrior dude elsewhere, but this is what I developed him for, this Metal Poster. It was a lot of fun, I kind of based the helmet on this one I found online: here.



So, the way I do the colors in Photoshop, I use a layer on top of the line art, set to "Multiply" and I just block out the areas, then go in with a brush tool and add whatever values and shading I need. This on was easy because so much of it was black.



I didn't want it to be just all black though, so I added another couple layers of splatters (which I merged for the above jpg), at two different opacity settings. I think the big main one was 35% the orange lighter stuff at 30%. This added a subtle hint of colors to the whole thing and texture that wasn't apparent from just coloring the line art without it.



I drew the text, but knew I wanted to do something new for this one. I put it on my copy machine and shrank it down to 50%, then blew that back up 200%, giving it a crustier war-torn feel. I like that, it's not vastly different from my usual crust, but just different enough to feel more ...Deathly.