Concept
I finished this drawing of Jason Todd (the second Robin) yesterday night. A friend of mine got me involved in a DC fan roleplay and I started digging around on Youtube for background information and came across the cutscenes from Arkham Knight. The plot line deviates from the official comics canon but Robin still meets some rather unfortunate circumstances. For anyone not familiar with DC, Jason Todd is the second Robin. Batman initially catches him attempting to steal the tires off the batmobile but ends up taking him in and training him. If you want to read more: http://batman.wikia.com/wiki/Jason_Todd
Process
I was pretty happy with the preliminary sketch. For my full scale illustrations, I usually end up drastically changing the image once I get to the coloring stage. I end up painting out and integrating the lines altogether so I don’t worry too much about perfecting details at this point.
I dropped in some base flats underneath the line art. At this point, I do some basic shading and blocking out forms.
This is where the image starts to come together. I focused a lot on lighting and detailing in this particular illustration. At this step, I merged the lineart and colors layers and am painting on a single layer. I tweak details and try to get everything looking correct.
The rendering is mostly done at this point, just detailing and polishing.
Final Version + Close-Ups
I decided to go with the darker sleeve version of the costume.
I'm quite happy with how all the details came out.
