Max Riffner

The Parlor

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Nanananana Batman!

After my post yesterday morning, I had a pretty good feeling about doing this poster for my cousin. My hands felt sufficiently warmed up. I got home after I purchased some new art supplies (because the puppy destroyed them all with her teeth) and quickly banged out the following sketch.

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Jackpot. I could see the final piece in my head very easily from that sketch. I scanned in the sketch, popped open iTunes and started playing the Batman Begins soundtrack. After that, I opened Illustrator CS, imported the sketch and started inking.

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Inks went well. I started on the body first since I knew where the blacks were going to be there (sparse), and then moved onto the glove, which I hadn’t quite worked out. After I finished the glove, I moved on to the next tricky part, the cape. After I had my basic form built on the folds of the cape, I went back in and revised my gloves a bit so they wouldn’t completely disappear.

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That is one sexy Batman. Or emo-Batman as Kenneth put it. In general, I kept thinking of Mazzucchelli’s work on Year One, so I didn’t think about emo, per se.

I decided that my work would look better with flat colors, so I laid my flats down first in separate layers in Illustrator, then I created three shade layers (face, cape/cowl, body) and used the Pen tool to create the shaded shapes. In general, I pushed the layers to Multiply>43% most of the time, and that seemed to work pretty well.

I’ll print it out sometime this week and sign it for my little cousin in gold metallic marker before I frame it up. I think he’ll go ape for it (or at least I hope so).

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