Here’s an homage piece to FLEX MENTALLO: MAN OF MUSCLE MYSTERY Hardcover!

I recently read it for a graphic novel book club. I’ve been excited to check it out ever since DC/Vertigo recently released the hardcover collecting the hard-to-find four-issue miniseries that Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely did back in 1996. If you know my artistic tastes, then you know I love Frank Quitely’s artwork. But I didn’t discover him until after these issues came out and were long off the shelves. Since there was never a tradepaperback, these issues were pretty hard to find. But I was confident that a collection would eventually come out. Glad I was right!

The read was what you’d expect from Grant Morrison — a lot of high concept ideas with many layers to his work referencing a lot of aspects to the comics industry. And Frank’s artwork was what you’d expect as well — it was fantastic in its subtleness, completeness, and hyper-detail.

After completing the read, I felt like I had to do an homage piece and decided to do a collage of characters and moments from the book. I wanted to do an 11×14 sized illustration so I could have some space to experiment emulating how Frank rendered certain things during this time of his career. Overall, I had a fun time experimenting with my microns on it.

Then, I think I stated this before, but when I do these full colored pieces, I’m always trying to learn something new that I haven’t done before. In this case, I wanted to separate the background figures from the main Flex figure (and bomb in the foreground). I opted to do it by using a color hold on the background figures in place of just solid black. Then instead of coloring/rendering each figure, I decided to overlay a color design. I went with a similar design/color scheme as used in the Flex Mentallo book. Lastly, I wanted to give it a rippling glow effect to mimic when Flex flexes in the book and uses his powers on the bombs. I use different opacities for each ripple, lessening it as the ripple goes outward. Still got a lot to learn about computer coloring, but happy with the outcome of this experiment.

==========================================

[11″x14″] Col-Erase Pencil -> Micron Pens -> Photoshop