Venomized Hulk - Part 3

June 22, 2022

Latest Post The Hound of the Baskervilles by Owen Soule

All Venomized things must come to an end and sadly such is the case with my Venomized Hulk series of posts. Having successfully received several blows to the head to alleviate my Venomized Hulk lunacy, my last step toward healing is sharing these pieces of "art therapy".

When last we left the Venomized Hulk, my pencils were nearing completion but lacked Venom tentacles and little Venom heads protruding here and there. Never fear, I have since tossed in those symbiote peculiarities and can now present you with the finished inks.

Finished inky goodness

With my inks in hand I was set to call it quits on this project, but something beckoned me to continue. As I stared for hours, possibly days, at the stark contrast of deep black India ink brushwork on brilliant white bristol board I gradually realized what must be done. Watercolor! Wait, that didn't happen, I planned the watercolor all along. What I didn't plan on was how ridiculously time consuming watercoloring a whole comic page was.. oh well, live and learn. After much mixing and smudging and waiting for layers to dry, here is the watercolored page...

The Jade Giant in soothing soft tones!

While that is all well and good, I wasn't totally satisfied with the contrast of the Venom symbiote on top of the Hulk. I went a bit too dark on Hulk's skin color which made the symbiote portions not POP as much as they should. I considered darkening the symbiote portions but that would have meant losing the ink detail in a murky watercolor soup.

Since I scanned my inks before watercoloring I figured why not chuck those suckers into Photoshop and try the digital color route? Having no reasonable response to that question, I did exactly that and here is the result.

Hypercolor makes my head asplode!

There you have it: a single comic page sketched in pencil, finish penciled digitally, printed out, inked, watercolored and finally digitally colored. I'm not fully satisfied with either color version but I have absolutely reached the end of my Venomized rope so I'll call it good enough. Now I'm checking out of this Venomized looney bin... freedom!

Owen Soule

Published June 22, 2022