I am lucky enough to once again have a piece of my work thrust into the spotlight over on the fantastic Scotch Corner. Appearing tomorrow will be my version of the Joker. Here is the work in progress for it.
2 
Initially I drew the head and face for the Joker in my sketch book.
I scanned this at 300dpi, mucked about in photoshop and added the hand with the playing card (1).
Then I started to add some colour to the piece, trying out different things but ultimately knowing that I wanted a classic colour scheme for the final piece (2).
4 
I changed my mind about how the piece should be cropped and added the top of the Joker's head... at this point I also added the little Joker as previously posted and the ambigram of the word Joker from the Harley Quinn piece I did in July (3).
The next step was to drop out all the colour and create an image that would only print from the cyan tank of my printer (4).
6 
I inked the "blue-scale" image after printing it out onto a nice sheet of bristol board (5).
Obviously I don't want all that blue, I just want the nice clean ink lines (6).
In photoshop there are plenty of ways to remove the blue - I use the channel mixer to remove most of the blue but some people prefer to convert to CMYK and then throw away the cyan channel. Both methods require some fiddling with levels to remove any grey areas and leave a nice Black and white image.
The final stage for me was to composite my two files (3) and (6), clean up any glaringly obvious problems, add some sort of background and a bit of texture to add some more depth to it all. To see how the final thing turned out, pop over to Scotch Corner on Saturday!
As an aside, I think this is pretty appropriate as a Halloween post!
5 Comments on Joker's Progress, last added: 11/2/2009
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Wow, he's really creepy. Loads of personality in this piece Kev. Nice work.
Nice idea Kev I really like the Mime style T-shirt
Really excellent piece. The step by step stuff is incredibly useful too so thanks for posting that :)
Nice Joker Kev! great seeing the various stages to.
Still gives me the creeps every time I see it! A great piece of work, and fascinating as always to see your process. It's great to see Joker brought up to date and given a new twist. Does he also wear a hoody...:) On a constructive / destructive note, I wonder in seeing it again whether the hand (although excellently constructed as it now is) should be more slender and spindly to match the lanky frame of the traditional Joker...??! Still knockout regardless!