President's Day

Sunday, February 15, 2009


As some of you have already seen on MySpace, Marvel is celebrating President's Day this year with a couple of digital comics featuring some familiar faces. As part of the festivities, they asked me to contribute a cover for "Gettysburg Distress," a 6-page free digital comic debuting today, written by Matt Fraction with art by Andy MacDonald.


Since I digitally colored the artwork, I gave Marvel a couple options for the background color. They also wanted me to give Cap eyes, so I did that in Photoshop.


The original is in ink on Marvel board. I ended up shrinking Lincoln's hand and altering his nose using Photoshop's liquify filter, a quick fix for any wonktastic drawing.


And finally, this is the 4" x 6" sketch that started the process. Simple and direct is usually the way to go. Happy President's Day!

Also, a big thank you goes out to my my girlfriend, who got me my favorite chocolate for Valentine's Day.

8 comments :

  1. Hey Paolo,

    Awesome piece man as usual!

    I wanted to ask you a question if you don't mind, I wanted to know when you finish a fully painted page what settings you scan the page into photoshop at as far as dpi goes and file format(jpg or tiff)? I would like to know how to do a lot of my own prepress work so I can send the correct format to printers, and was curious what Marvel usually asks for when you prep a painted page for them? Do the scan settings differ from a painted page to a penciled page?

    I appreciate your help Paolo and thanks for always being so generous with the amount of tutorials and amazing artwork you post on your blog.

    Best,

    Jeremy de la Garza

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  2. Thanks, Reau! It was good seeing you at the con.

    Jeremy, that subject warrants a post of its own, so I'll get to work on that. In the meantime, here are my press-ready file specs:

    2750 x 4175 pixels
    flattened tiffs with lzw compression
    CMYK color

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  3. Awesome. I hope he's heading down to Wall Street. It reminds me of Fight Club.

    "Abe Lincoln. Big reach. Skinny guys fight till they're burger."

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  4. Paolo,

    Thanks a lot man! With the 2750 x 4175 pixels... is that about a 300 dpi scan for an 11x17 page?

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  5. I could totally imagine Abe Lincoln opening a can of stomp-ass on someone. Certain pictures of him in his younger days looka little like my father-in-law.

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  6. Jeremy,

    300 dpi should be fine. I've gotten away with 266... though lately I've been scanning at 400, regardless. I don't need to, but it's nice to have in case you want to show a detail or something.

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  7. Paolo,

    Thanks a lot for all of the info, I appreciate it.

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