["Do I sense that it is some foolish mortals birthday today? Make a wish and seal your fate!"] Today is my long-time friend Jim's birtday. Back in the day, he used to collect comic books, and I'd read them (mooch off him). This was during (one of) the heyday(s) of comic books, when The Swamp Thing, Crisis on Infinite Earths, The Dark Knight Returns, and The Watchmen were comic out.

So I decided to draw The Spectre, who was a minor character that Alan Moore used for repeated appearances in The Swamp Thing and later was given his own solo title. I found this cover image of The Spectre issue number 1 from 1987 that I liked and decided to use it as a reference image.

I started late in the day yesterday and more or less had it finished last night and did a small bit of cleanup this morning. I like how it came out. While it's not perfect, I think it's reasonable. I got a little lazy at the end in the lower left corner with shading, but that left room for a quick 'happy birthday' to be included.

I drew a line version of it in Photoshop. Then took it into Illustrator and traced it with the pen tool (I need to try the Live Trace option). Then used Live Paint on that and copied and pasted it back into Photoshop. I was a little lazy with the text. First, the scroll was a little short, but it was fine when I used 4 lines. I only quickly looked for a similar font but didn't want to spend too much time, so I used "Swamp Thing" font because if nothing else, it was appropriately named. I found a useful video online about how to make a starry background, which made it really easy. It also included planets, which I used. The original was just an orange circle, but I decided this could be fancier. On the flip-side, from the start I decided I was absolutely not going to redraw the stream of bodies flowing around The Spectre. That would have taken me many days and it wouldn't have looked good. And since I was substituting a slice of birthday cake in place of the Earth, I figured it wouldn't have made that much sense anyway. (Rationalization's great!)

I did some color shading and line shading but I didn't go nuts on it. I think it works, especially given the quick turnaround. The "stop" hand is decent, the "claw" hand isn't as good, but again, I didn't want this to take days. I cropped the final image to cut out some extra dead space. Here is the full resolution image (though it's still cropped, you're not missing anything). images/Drawings/Sketches/spectre-sm.png