John Constantine, Hellblazer (Process)

Good morning all. In a strange turn of events, Ive been cast to play John Constantine in a Batman fan film shooting in Minnesota this coming spring/summer. As a huge fan of the character, this is super exciting for me, and seemed like a solid reason to use him as the focus of a sketch from the other day.

When illustrating, especially comics or comic-related content, I tend to get really hung up on rendering and detail. The goal of this piece, as has been my overall goal lately, was to loosen up a bit. So first, the initial sketch. John Constantine, all trench coat, smoke and spite.

Next it was time to drop in the base colors on him.

Once I was happy with the initial rendering, it was time to drop out the initial sketch layer and add some black linework, which was purposefully kept pretty minimal.

I wasn’t crystal clear on what I wanted to do with the background when I started the piece, but I decided on a texture-heavy street scene at night. So time to block it out!

As you can see, the starting palette of the background really only uses colors already present in John. Hopefully this subtly reenforces the idea John belongs to the city, and vice versa. Next up was more blocking, starting to play with some lighting as well.

Now at this point the general composition is basically complete, still using a really limited palette. So it’s time to add some movement and color. This idea was super rough, basically to add the idea of traffic to the piece, but also implying that John is either unconcerned with it, or I effected by it.

And finally, some last detail work. Little bit of graffiti on the building, and some random white splashes, which would be an ideal spot for the title treatment, were this a cover for the comic.

I could for sure spend more time on this, adding more depth or interest to the sky and background. But for a quick sketch piece, I’m fairly content with how it turned out. Anyway, hope y’all have a lovely weekend. Thanks for stopping by!