5-Minute Marvels: The Inhumans!

Friend Tim Miner hosts a great blog called 5-Minute Marvels, where he, along with his daughters Grace and Cate, spends five minutes drawing a Marvel comic character (though not just) to be posted on their blog. Over time they have amassed a fine collection of talented web-followers who join them in cranking out five-minute drawings, an impressive roster of names at that. I recently threw myself in the mix. Tim knew I had a love for all things Kirby and suggested we draw the Inhumans, specifically the characters referenced on the cover of FF #54. So I went to work and tried to do a quick rendition of the Attilan Royal Family. I decided to do a longer inking job and an even longer coloring job to post here. Check out Tim and Grace's great Inhumans pieces, along with mine, here. Thanks for including me, guys, let's do it again real soon.

For a little process view of how I draw in Flash, see below:



1. I begin by sketching each character on a separate layer in Flash. The different colors for the figures is only so I can tell them apart when drawing each one together in a composition. I pulled them all apart, as seen on the right, to illustrate how they were drawn separately. Each character was sketched out in less than 5-minutes individually to keep with the project's essence.



2. Wanting to finish the piece for my own purposes, I threw down a quick ink on yet another layer. After erasing the sketch layers, I export the piece to Photoshop.



3. I start coloring in the CMY channels over the black ink layer. Here's the initial coloring. Adding effects and filters and elf dust, I turned this colored piece into an "aged, newsprint comic book" illustration as seen at the top of the post. Done!

--B