Matt Herms: Comic Art and Illustration: Mega Man 17 Cover

I'm so psyched that this awesome Chad Thomas/Gary Martin Mega Man cover finally dropped in the solicits. I colored this up a couple months ago and in a rare moment of forethought managed to capture a few "snapshots" of the coloring process to share with you guys. So here we go - Mega Man #17's cover, featuring the debut of fan favorite Proto Man!

Here it is, in black-and-white. My editor at Archie will usually send me the inks in 450 to 600 dpi Bitmap mode. I was immediately excited seeing that Protoman was gonna' be the focus in this story-arc and I was very pleased to be working with Chad Thomas again. Chad's style is definitely what I think of when I think US-made Mega Man comic books.

The flats! I usually prefer to do my own flatting, especially on covers. This was a super quick job - Gary's inking style makes the whole process a breeze. Nothing fancy and in alotta' cases I haven't even picked out a final color for anything - right now I'm just getting the pieces separated to make coloring and editing easier.

Doin' some rendering! For this one I've got a couple ideas for color schemes to try out so I've done a pretty basic rendering on Protoman and company that I will tinker with in a moment. Right now we're just setting up the light sources and textures and will move onto trying a couple different tones in a moment.

And here we go! This would be the "first pass" that I send to my editors for input and apporvals. Went with a prominently red and fiery tone on this one to mimic Proto's colors. Overall it was felt that Protoman blended a little too much into the background of this one, so-o-o-o...