LEARNING HOW TO PAINT WITH MARKER COMPS

One of the things that has surfaced within the past fifteen years is painted stories and covers for comic books. Alex Ross is probably the most well known comic book illustrator who does this type of artwork. I admired it early on but didn't have the knowledge of how to do it. Although I was able to by the time I left American Academy Of Art, I didn't really learn painting there. I learned how to paint by doing marker drawings and by assisting the illustrators at Steven Edsey & Sons. I learned that there were 2 ways to color storyboard frames - either by printing out line work and coloring it, or by placing a piece of marker paper onto a pencil drawing and building the artwork with the colors and shadows. This method is called tone-on-tone and takes a lot longer to do than just coloring in pictures. Although it is laborious, it is fun to see the finished product. Here are some tone-on-tone pieces I did several years ago:

When it comes to advertising, this type of process is practically extinct, due to advances in computer digital art ( although it can be mimicked digitally). I still use this method before working on a painting. You can see an example of that HERE.