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Description
This is the coloured version of the Lex/axe line art piece.

Because I’m really panicky about making mistakes and never ever ever being able to undo them, I’ve developed this habit of photocopying the pieces I want to colour and working on that. So the line art in this is pure Xerox magic.

From the beginning I knew I wanted to use bright colours. I did try to use Photoshop, but I found it way too tricky to colour around all the hatching I’d done. So instead I cracked out my eight pack of Stabilo fluorescent markers, which has two different pinks, two different blues, but no red. Which I was bummed about, because I really wanted Lex to have a fire axe or something. Smallville’s a pretty well equipped town, right? A fire axe available to the general public would make sense. Though how you put out a fire with an axe is beyond me.

Then, while I had achieved a kind of unnatural look with all the fluoro, it didn’t really look sinister. I added the black smudges – acrylic paint – with a cheap brush – and I mean really cheap, one of those ’20 brushes for $1.50’ kind of brushes – that I’d trimmed down. It’s got all uneven bristles, and is long enough to have some flex in it, but still fairly stiff. The colours are brighter out here in real life, but my scanner is less than perfect. I did some tweaking in Photoshop 7.0, but if I got one colour looking right, two others would be off. It’s only a minor difference anyway.

I initially wanted the contents of the speech bubble to be done in letters torn out of magazines, for the creepiness factor, but added the wording in Photoshop because I just couldn’t find letters the right size/appearance, with Lana’s name being in Cocaine Sans font, and the question mark in Hurricane.

Description
This is the coloured version of the Lex/axe line art piece.

Because I’m really panicky about making mistakes and never ever ever being able to undo them, I’ve developed this habit of photocopying the pieces I want to colour and working on that. So the line art in this is pure Xerox magic.

From the beginning I knew I wanted to use bright colours. I did try to use Photoshop, but I found it way too tricky to colour around all the hatching I’d done. So instead I cracked out my eight pack of Stabilo fluorescent markers, which has two different pinks, two different blues, but no red. Which I was bummed about, because I really wanted Lex to have a fire axe or something. Smallville’s a pretty well equipped town, right? A fire axe available to the general public would make sense. Though how you put out a fire with an axe is beyond me.

Then, while I had achieved a kind of unnatural look with all the fluoro, it didn’t really look sinister. I added the black smudges – acrylic paint – with a cheap brush – and I mean really cheap, one of those ’20 brushes for $1.50’ kind of brushes – that I’d trimmed down. It’s got all uneven bristles, and is long enough to have some flex in it, but still fairly stiff. The colours are brighter out here in real life, but my scanner is less than perfect. I did some tweaking in Photoshop 7.0, but if I got one colour looking right, two others would be off. It’s only a minor difference anyway.

I initially wanted the contents of the speech bubble to be done in letters torn out of magazines, for the creepiness factor, but added the wording in Photoshop because I just couldn’t find letters the right size/appearance, with Lana’s name being in Cocaine Sans font, and the question mark in Hurricane.