Kickman, Superman Homage Cover

Entry for @cobmaximus's comic cover contest. Here we see Kickman, who is of course just as valid a superhero as Superman, but of course he only has super strong legs (and no flight, invulnerability, heat vision, freeze breath, superspeed, super hearing, x-ray vision, or arctic secret base).

based on this original classic cover:

Here's the process steps. First the rough sketch. I should probably start doing this in two separate layers just so you an see how rough this starts out. The green color is the original figure. It's basically a fat stick figure with a wide brush. After that I go over it one more time in blue with a slightly thinner brush (still not as thin as the black lines I'll use later though). Start fleshing out some of the details in the head.

I did the title logo next. Wish I had a video to show how I did this because it seems like a big leap from 1 to 2. First I plot the top and bottom curved lines for the top and bottom of the letters. Then using the green "Kickman" as a guide, just use the line tool to make the front 2-d surface of the letters. To make them into 1980's block letters, I just copied the entire front surface, pasted it to a new layer, dragged it slightly up and left, make it slightly flatter on the vertical axis and slightly longer horizontal. Then plotted straight lines from the "front kickman" to the "back kickman" and erase anything overlapping. Not sure how clear that is to everyone, but I think the main takeaway is... you should never use block letters like these for your comic. :)

Next is a separate layer for the black lines for the figure.

Hide the rough art layer so that you are left with a clean line image.

Next fill in some color. I see a lot of artist's complain about how long it takes "flatting" their colors. I just use the magic wand and fill tool. I've seen some people say you shouldn't do that because it leaves gaps between the black lines and the color, which it does. But with paint.net at least, all you need to do is "deselect" the magic wand area then tap the fill tool on the color block you just made. This fills in the area of color with the same area of color, except that it also causes the area to fill out slightly. Usually a quick double tap is all I need to make the color "bleed" under the black line layer. Easy.

Superhero costumes are shiny. So I use a light baby blue color to draw some highlight areas on the costume. Then blur it using the gaussian blur (it may be called something else in other programs. Basically, just blur it).

I tend to phone in my backgrounds. That's why I chose this cover... :o)
Create a new layer in the background. I could have used the line tool to plot a few lines and fill them in, but I even took a bigger shortcut. I just did an image search for "anime effects" because manga uses that line effect a lot. I found one then just highlighted the black lines and stretched the image to fill my frame.

Then, because I wanted MORE LINES I just copied that layer and flipped it on the vertical axis to fill in the background more. See what I mean about cheating the background.

Last step, just fill in the entire background under the "manga lines" with the gradient fill tool. Important to use a color that contrasts with the chains so that those pop. And that's it. Hope you enjoy. If you're a beginner, hope some of these hints helped out.

And if you really want to help a brother out, could you go over to Kickman's page in the Webtoons Discovery Contest and like every chapter of Kickman because the winner of the contest wins $80,000 and can get hired on as a regular webcomic contributor. Please. Pretty please? Here's the link: https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/kickman/list?title_no=207535