I wanted to thank my Uncle Steve for the fashion photos he took of me while I was in Minnesota last month. Like me he’s a big comic book collector so it was only natural to paint an icon like Superman. The painting is based on artwork by Alex Ross. I consider Ross the Norman Rockwell of the comic book world. I studied his work while I was learning how to paint in oils in college at School of Visual Arts. Again I used Procreate’s “Old Square Brush” that I found in the website’s forums. 

It’s definitely a new favorite of mine. I started out with a blue line sketch, and a charcoal sketch before blocking in the digital paint. I also blended the skintones with the same Old Square Brush for consistency. Late into the project I played around with Superman’s “heat vision” and one painting became a sequential series. This involved using the Perspective Grid and the Luminance Brushes to achieve this effect. I thought of these paintings as comic book panels. They all work together to show an action scene. Art created in Procreate on iPad Pro using an Apple Pencil.