Iron Man!

Been a little while again.  I'm just about finished with the last page of the Heroes for Hire samples.  In the meantime I worked on a gift for my nephew, Max.  It was his sixth birthday a few days ago.  He and his younger brother are the only grandkids for both sides of the family so it's safe to say their birthday present loads are pretty substantial.  Considering this I thought I'd take a different route this year.  He's been an Iron Man fan for quite awhile and since I have the ability to make a half ways decent Iron Man drawing (I hope) why not do that for him instead?  Here's what I came up with:

If you've read any of my recent posts-which really isn't likely :)-you'll know I've been have some struggles recently.  These issues kind of carried over for this but I was able to work past them.  I did have a bit of a false start but other than that things worked out fairly well.  As I struggled with the pose I actually went to a very, very loose style on some sketch paper.  Something that I could continue to build up and get a real feel for the over pose and even contour of the figure without being focused at all on details.  It was one of the moments that really made me want to work with a light box.

Anyway, this pose was, for the most part, derived from that sketch.  The next big challenge was coming up with a background.  I was pretty committed to keeping Iron Man in the air but couldn't really figure out why he would be up there.  My initial thought was to put a bunch of skyscrapers behind him but I kind of go to the "tall building background" enough that I wanted to do something else.  I started searching for Iron Man images on the internet and saw something on deviantart that caught my eye.  It was a painting that had Iron Man above a hilly/mountainous area.  It was just the type of "different" setting that I was looking for.

The mountains here draw heavily from a reference photo I found online.  I thought I might draw some "enemies" in the background but thought it would be better to focus on Iron Man himself and leave any assailants off "camera".

I think it turned out pretty well.  At this point my nephew still doesn't have it.  His birthday is passed but we're planning on a family birthday party next weekend so he should get it then.  I suppose there's not a lot he can do with it but after C2E2 I gave him a Wolverine ornament I bought from Len Wein and he loved that so I suppose not all of his gifts have to flash and make noise.  But if I could add some LEDs to this....