I’ve finally had time this weekend to settle down and hatch out the final version of my Chicken Superheroes commission.
To get a crisp black and white drawing, I drew on Bristol Board, on Daler Rowney, A3 250 gsm. I was going to use a dip pen but the first time that I loaded up the nib with Nan-King Indian Ink, it dropped ink blots on the paper, which luckily was my roughs notebook, not the final artwork.
I brought my various roughs together in Photoshop, added lettering in InDesign and printed out a full size version on two sheets of A4, then traced over this onto the Bristol Board, which despite the name is more like a thick cartridge paper. I made a few changes to poses and accessories along the way.
It’s a tradition for superheroes traditionally wear primary colours, partly because of the limitations of colour printing on the poor quality paper that was used for American comics in the 1940s and 50s. I needed yellow for the lettering and red for the wattles and the mask that I’d decided to give each chicken, so I searched for ‘red and yellow colour scheme’ on Google and came up with these swatches that add two purples/violets to the mix.