Finally I draw a comic book superhero!

Self Critique: Might have to do some foreshortening studies. From elbow to hand it works well, but from elbow to shoulder needs more work.
Addressing: gloves. I didn’t notice in the comic that she had a v-cut sleeve and not full on gloves. Later iterations do give her gloves however. So if someone wants to point out that I did the wrong design, I already know. My bad. Same goes for the ring around her eye. Sometimes I see a ring, other times I see a crescent. I chose a ring.

For quite a while I’ve been wanting to do fanart of a western character, primarily a superhero. Several years ago when I was introduced to the Justice League Unlimited tv show, There was some ladies on there that I thought would made good candidates, primarily Black Canary. Sadly, I could never get around to doing that. Then the local comic book guy in my block came with some comics. He had a couple of old comics of Cloak & Dagger. The only knowledge I had of these two superheroes was from their appearance in game Spider-Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage. Curious to know more, I picked up both issues he had. As I read, bam, there was Dagger sitting on the altar. Quite the first impression. I realized there that she’d be a good candidate to draw. And since she had something of a gymnast moveset whenever she fought, it’d be good practice for doing dynamic poses.

To start off, I posed my body-chan model into position. When I finished it, I wanted to do something that I already tried with STB-Chan’s legs, which was to use the perspective tool on the schematic skeleton’s legs and skew the bottom of the legs to make it appear closer to the viewer. But this time, I’d do it to Dagger’s arm. As stated in the self-scritique, it went pretty well from the elbow to the hand. Satisfied, I did this to her other arm too, only this time to make it move away from the viewer and further into the background.

Keeping up with the dynamic poses, I chose to do a dynamic background too. But unlike previous backgrounds, this time the model (Dagger in this case) would stay as she is while the environment itself would be tilted. I sifted through both comics I had to get some references as to how the church in there looked. There weren’t many good shots, and some were drawn with heavy shadows. So I had to pull up a secondary reference with a photo of a church. When laying out the sketch, I tried using the perspective tool to skew the bottom of certain columns inward to show height. It wasn’t working well however, So I reverted everything back and settled with what I had. Once everything was shaded and textured, I applied a dark blue filter on the entrire background to capture that dark atmosphere seen in the comic, and erase away parts of the filter where the stained-glass windows were. I tried applying dark filters on Dagger herself, but it wasn’t meshing well. Plus this girl’s all about like, so I decided to set the dark filters to a very low opacity and add more strength to the light filters.

In the end, I like what I was able to do with the background in terms of angle and darkness, as well making it so that Dagger stood out.

Done on Clip Studio Paint Pro. Intuos4 Tablet used.
Dagger is © Marvel Comics (specifically Bill Mantlo and Ed Hannigan).
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This artwork was sponsored by otakusexart.com
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