The Spectacular Spider-Man Gets Dimension

First off, before anything else I want to mention that the drawing this image was rendered over was not one of mine. It's important to mention because I do not want to be accused of plagarism. This image was rendered over character design sketches for the animated Spectacular Spider-Man animated television series. The reason it's show here is because I brought it to a whole other level with Photoshop, and I wanted to show off some of what I'm capable of rendering with Photoshop.

I've made no secret that my preference is for traditional illustration styles, but when I say preference, that does not speak a distaste for digital imagery. In fact I enjoy playing with it quite a lot and there is quite a bit I am capable of doing with it that goes beyond some of the normal things that I've seen. In this particular case, I was sitting up last night, enjoying some down time, about 8p.m., I looking at some images on the web, and almost without thinking I decided to render one of the images to make it look more "3-Dimensional". The next thing I knew it was 2 in the morning. Sadly, that's kind of what being an artist has done to me. Instead of catching up on my sleep, I get absorbed in little projects, many of which I have no intention of using, and in this case, not even the rights to use, other than for self promotional purposes.

Someone might point out that I'm using a transparency in the armpit webbing and one might think that this violates my declared pet peeve of transparencies overlapping graphic black line, so let me clarify here, there are no solid lines in this illustration. It is my opinion that graphic images should stay graphic, but in an image, such as this. There is no black line. What might appear to be a line around the figure are dark "glows", and soft shadows. In life, images are rarely focused so that a line is graphic like the black outline. I love ink lines. It is my favorite way to render anything and I have super protective about line integrity. But this is not ink and there are no graphic lines shown here.

Anyway, I have to say, I think that this animated Spider-Man series, is brilliant. I love the design. I love the very retro approach to the original source material. There are always things about shows like this that I could identify how I'd do it differently, but this is, for sure, the best animated Spider-Man series I've seen to date.