Spider-Man Painting Process

I always do a few thumbnails to work out what I might what to draw. In this case I went with the first one because I liked the composition and I happened to have some really good reference for the anatomy.


Doing color studies is something that I've just recently started doing. It helps to nail down what your palette is going to be. There is a lot of harmony and balance that goes into color and it's not something you should just makeup as you go along. In this case though I ended up altering my background colors quite a bit. Never get married to one idea. If something isn't working, throw it away and find what does. This probably happened because I didn't take enough time and due multiple colors roughs. I tend to be a go with my first idea kind of guy and it continually bites me in the butt.

Here are the pencils. I changed the way I work with this piece. I usually mount a copy of the image onto illustration board but this time I draw right on my gessoed board. It doesn't erase very well so you have to know what you're drawing pretty well before putting it down. I could have drawn it out and used transfer paper but I don't like to take the proper time to do something right because I'm in a rush to get to painting. Again, you shouldn't do this as it'll bite you in the butt. Luckily, I got away with it here.

After I draw the image in pencil on my 15x20 gessoed illustration board I spray it with spray fixative to seal the pencils so they don't smudge. I think do the bulk of the paint with traditional oil paints. I use synthetic brushes to get a smoother look then you would get with bristle brushes. I usually lay in a brown sienna wash to get rid of all the white. After that dries I lay in my first layer of paint paying special attention to edges and my darks. It's important to get this right at the start as it's harder to change and fix things later on. I let that dry. A note to any oil painter reading this. I use a 50/50 terpanoid/pressed linseed oil medium with a few drops of cobalt dryer. My stuff usually dries overnight, something it might take an extra day depending on what colors I used as different colors have different drying times.

I should have taken some process shots during the painting but I didn't plan on posting this as a process. It just kind of turned out that way. After the painting I use a Nikon D80 camera to take digital photos of my painting. The best way to do this is outside on an overcast day but if that's not an option I've got a lighting setup in my studio. When ever I get some time I'll post an detailed "how to take pictures of my art" post.

After I get the image into photoshop I do quite a bit of tweaking. I saved all of Spidey's webbing on his costume because it's was easier to do digitally and I could play around with how I wanted to do his webbing. I also adjust my levels, contrast, and tweak the colors. After I got all that done I won't happy with how saturated the colors were or how the large yellow abstract spiders in the bottom corner competed with Spidey. The unfinished section at the top didn't turn out like the cool abstract background I was shooting for. I made a layer in photoshop, through some blue in there and changed the mode to "hue" This tied the background together much better. I also zoomed in for the final composition. There was just too much space surrounding spidey and I didn't like it.

In the end I think the final one turned out pretty decent. I just wanted to post this to show how much things changed as you go along in a project. It would help a lot if I took more time in the initial planning stages and I plan to in the future but for my it's a constant war between keeping my interest high while working on the piece and becoming bored because I've make all the decisions and there are not surprises left.

I didn't proof this for grammar or sentence structure so please overlook those faults. English is my first language.