My nephew requested a drawing of Black Panther and Iron Man. How can I pass that challenge up? I took that opportunity on my next livestream to work through it before his bedtime. He even dressed up for the occasion. 

I created this as a fan art style illustration. I knew that I'd be working with Marvel content, and I didn't want to be crossing into copyright territory. I used MULTIPLE references from the movies, posters, and original material. 

I had been wanting to do an Iron Man drawing for a while now, so I had a bit of a style in mind. To execute that style, I started creating the line art using Adobe Illustrator on the desktop. I laid out the shapes using a bit of a technical approach. I put in a lot of perfect circles, and lines that could be interpreted as blue print approaches etc. 

Once that was ready I exported the line art over to Fresco on the iPad in time for the livestream. To start off I threw in large splashes of colour. I knew that I wanted to experiment with some of the different brushes, so I started there immediately. 

Black Panther was a great opportunity to really push these brushes as his Marvel movie costume is full of wonderful patterns. 

Iron Man was a surprising challenge, because it was all metal, and instead of different patterns, it was more different types of light to imitate. I balanced the two out by adding more of the technical lines to the Iron Man layout in comparison to the number of brushes used on Black Panther. 

To finish off the design, I really focused on the line art. I really wanted all of those technical line to play in to the final look of the piece, especially on Iron Man. I used multiple layers, some hue/saturation effects, and some masking to brighten up some of the lines in the darker areas (Iron Man's back). This was a lot of trial and error, trying to keep the lines nice and crisp throughout. I worked a lot with masks so that I wouldn't lose any content while I found the right balance of light and dark. 

At the end I added my standard hierarchy lines to bring in that comic book feel, and create clearer division lines where the patterns might be getting a little muddy. I am beyond thrilled with this final result. 

Watch the full livestream here! 

This livestream was ON FIRE! Everyone was involved on all the socials. Everyone had feedback and comments. And more importantly, the requester was a happy customer.