Another Spider-Man

So, above is my newest piece. Let me first say that I LOVE Spider-Man, and if anyone cares to know, yes I'm excited about the movie reboot! I think Andrew Garfield is a perfect casting decision. But before I lose myself and go off on a tangent about that lets talk about this piece. Spider-Man is probably one of if not my favorite character to draw. I don't really know why, maybe it has something to do with how you can contort him into virtually any position and it still looks correct. Or maybe it's that his costume is one of the most well designed costumes in all of comicdom (In My Opinion). I'm not really sure I just know I love to draw him.

Now I was thinking of doing another tutorial for this, but process wise not much really changed between this and the last Hellboy piece with how I constructed the image. So to avoid redundancy I didn't make a full blown tutorial but I did post images of the various steps from start to finish with a few comments under each one. Enjoy!
Above is the initial sketch I did in my sketch book. It took me a long time to get it so the legs didn't look weird. I think I managed it but if I stare at it for too long he looks very strange.

Next I lightboxed the drawing from my sketchbook onto Canson Marker paper and blue lined in the basic pattern of the city behind Spidey.
I then spent probably 5-7 hours painstakingly referencing and drawing buildings. This was a piece where the architecture was something I really wanted to get right. I've noticed that I often don't put enough detail or character into my buildings and they often look very generic and dull. Or I cheat and just do a silhouetted skyline which can work but is sorta a cheat in a piece like this since there isn't much else going on. Hopefully I succeeded in making the buildings look believable and visually interesting.
As always inking is almost meditative for me. I spend so much time on my pencils that I don't really have to think much about the drawing while doing it. I actually have to admit that I used microns, for the buildings because using a crow quill for uniform line weight is just frustrating and ineffective. I did use a crow quill on Spidey to get more flowing lines. I have to say I didn't love the Canson paper as much as the mylar (which I discovered is officially called drafting film. at least in Utrecht) but it was sufficient and got the job done.

The gradations on the buildings were done with a dried out black marker I had as well as black colored pencil. The nice thing about the colored pencil was that it gave a nice texture to the buildings which I'm not sure I could have accomplished as easily with ink wash.

The other benefit to that was when I did use the ink wash on Spider-Man, it gave his costume a smoother feel in contrast to the buildings. I'm glad this worked because texture is a really important aspect of drawing that I think is often overlooked. I'm in no way saying that I'm a master of texture but it is something I feel is important and something I'd like to improve on.

Once the inks were done I brought it into Photoshop and added a blue gradient background and flatted the image. The first image is just the very basic flat colors and the second image shows what it looked like after I erased the color out of the windows and tightened it up. I limited my color choice on the buildings to more muted reds and golds so that it wouldn't distract from Spider-Man and because brightly colored buildings are not the norm in a large city like New York.
This was just a bit of color variation. I selected the flat colors and added subtle gradation to add depth to the image.
Then I added some more texture to the buildings and the sky.

This was actually kinda an accident where I filled a layer with more blue than I meant to, but I kept it because I really liked how it made the image pop. I also started to add some lighting to the buildings and added a few clouds.

You can also see that I added high lights and shadow to Spider-Man using the lasso tool and an air brush technique. (Check out the Hellboy tutorial if you want a refresher on how that's done)
Next I added a light yellow-gold "glaze layer" to add an overall sunbathed feeling. I almost stopped here but something didn't quite feel done. You'll also notice that I converted the lines of the webbing to white in order to make it look less solid and more wispy and light.

This seems a bit complicated at first, but you basically select the lines of the image create a new layer and then choose a color and an area of the selection to fill in using a brush. I'll do a tutorial on this at some point
I decided that it felt a bit too yellow, so I added another overlay layer with a deep blue gradient to light blue (almost white) in order to cool down the lower half of the image.

Finally I added some, I guess you could call it sun glow? I'm not sure but it adds the effect of bright sunlight bouncing and glowing off the surfaces of the buildings and Spider-Man.

Overall I'm pretty happy with this and I feel accomplished with the image as a whole.