Designing a Retro-Style Superhero

Learn to create a silver-age superhero.

Introduction

• Welcome

1. Turning a Person into a Silhouette

• Masking a person from a white background
• Smoothing out the edges of a jagged mask

2. Making the Silhouette Fly

• Adding power and motion with Liquify
• Puppet warping the legs closer together
• Applying a perspective-style transformation
• Smoothing and removing details with Liquify

3. Painting the Body and the Face

• Filling and stroking the silhouette
• Drawing with the Pen and Brush tools
• Hand-painting the face
• Refining brushstrokes with Median and Minimum

4. Creating a Dramatic Background

• Adding complementary colored clouds
• Drawing a handful of spikes in Illustrator
• Creating a burst pattern with Transform
• Adjusting the spikes for a better effect
• Bringing the burst pattern into Photoshop

5. Adding the Grill Lines

• Creating the extreme paths for the grill lines
• Blending the grill lines in Illustrator
• Correcting potential blending problems
• Bringing the blended paths into Photoshop
• Simulating pressure when stroking paths
• Contouring the grill lines onto the face

6. Drawing Hands

• Drawing a hand with the Pen tool
• Converting the hand path to a shape layer
• Finishing off the hands and gloves

7. Adding the Flames

• Blend, scale, and rotate photographic flames
• Filling in gaps with symmetrical flames
• Shooting flames out of the hero's hands
• Stroking the composite flames

8. Every Composition Needs Refinement

• Drawing cartoon flames as a shape layer
• Enhancing the flames with layer effects
• Adjusting Puppet Warp and Expansion

9. The Monologue and Talk Balloons

• Installing a free comic-lettering font
• Formatting the monologue text
• Drawing the talk balloons (a.k.a. speech bubbles)

10. Creating a Custom Font

• Selecting a font-creation software
• Drawing consistently rendered letterforms
• Pasting the letters into Glyphs Mini (Mac only)
• Copying capitals into lowercase positions (Mac only)
• Generating an OpenType font (Mac only)
• Stylizing the custom font in Photoshop

Conclusion

• Time lapse of the retro superhero
• Until next time