This illustration was done for the TRDL R3 Illustration Jam, the subject being Kirby’s New Gods.

When I was working on my previous Mister Miracle piece, I was doing some supernet searches to get a costume color reference for color rendering at the coffee shop that afternoon, and I came across this scan of an old Kirby concept sheet for Mister Miracle that blew me away. It’s the little things: the details in their initial pass, the colors, probably more influenced by the markers available at hand and now weathered by age more than design, but still… the whole thing spoke to me. So i decided to do a second piece showcasing Miracle as he appeared in that first sketch.

Here he is, selling bike U-locks.

Please enjoy!

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You can find a larger version here.

You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Tribute Gallery.

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Process Notes:

My Process:

On this piece, I was inspired by the colors in the original sketch in their current form, whether faded or design… the tones just spoke to me, the olive/ maroon/blanched yellow… so that’s what i went with.

Here’s the inks, before some tweaks and adjustments. I ran out of room on the page so he’s footless, poor New God… but I drew a sample foot so i could remember the cool design.

Here’s the digital feet. Done digitally.

On this one I did flats in rough blobs first so i could see if the colors were a terrible mistake. I think I darkened the red a bit and added some saturation to the yellow but otherwise they represent the original piece pretty well. There were costume details I had to extrapolate, like his collar and some stuff going on with his belt. Not a big fan of that wonky holster, but hey.

Here’s flats and then the rendered version afterward.

From there, it was just building up the ad in the usual way. I love the idea of him hawking the product like that. It would be like Houdini selling padlocks. Anyway, good stuff.

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

Related posts:

1. TRDL Tribute – Mister Miracle [and Big Barda]
2. TRDL Tribute: Mister Sinister