Vector Spiderman: it’s all in the detail

by Martin

The folks at The Jupiter Drawing Room commissioned me for a large format illustration of your friendly neighborhood, for a billboard application at Musica. As the brief called for a large format and good detail, I decided to go all vector on Spidey. It would be more laborious at times, but the scalability of the format was worth it.

I’d like to show you the process for this piece, as it involved some experimentation that could be interesting.

Drafts.jpg

After we settled on a pose and a preliminary lighting study for the character, I started work on the linework directly in Adobe Illustrator. Working in a vector format was perfectly suited for this specific assignment. Although the Wacom pressure sensitivity and line accuracy in Illustrator isn’t as precise as in Photoshop, you get another level of control over the lines after they’re expanded.

Linework.jpg

The classical comic book linework works well if the character is to be colored later, but for a black and white illustration, it appears completely empty and flat. In order to apply a detailed shading (such as a typical comic book hatching), there were two choices for me; to draw each hatching line by hand -an admirable endeavor that I initially supported- or to come up with some other process that I could control better towards a finer detail when the billboard was looked at up close.

I recalled the old days when shading was applied from a pre-printed acetate pattern over the inked drawing. Once (a very long time ago) I made and printed out some dot gradient patterns in a rudimentary design application, to apply over a black and white illustration. When I remembered this, a new possibility appeared: how about creating a pattern to apply over the “inks”, but also warping it over the shapes of the body, to give the illusion of depth?

This are the patterns that I created in Illustrator.

Patterns.jpg

The hexagonal pattern would be for the red portion of the costume, as a fabric texture. The “comb” pattern was to be used on the blue sections, and the finer one was detail over the eyes and soles. There is one little caveat though; Illustrator doesn’t have a proper warping filter. It would have to be done in Photoshop, which meant I’d have to raster (or convert the image to pixels), losing the patterns as vectors.

Warping.jpg

The process proved quite successful; the pattern translated well as a texture that follows the curves of the body. Working in a very high pixel resolution, I could later revectorize the shading without losing the original vector’s quality.

Web_relief.jpg

After many adjustments, the shading started to come together. Bumping up the web design over the red portion of the suit helped to keep the shadows from becoming too dark, as also did adding a second light source from behind. I considered the blue portions as made from a darker, more reflective material. The straight hatching accentuated this difference, as well.

straight_hatching.jpg

In the end, the result of the experiment was an illustration that displayed quite a bit of detail up close, and that was fully rendered as vectors and thus, scalable to any size.

2hands.jpg

Check out the finished piece in a larger size over here.