Verran Leonardo DaVinci - Age Twenty
Verran Mercurio Conti - Vatican Inquisitor
I've spent a lot of my time lately focussing on androids and robots. Maybe I've been watching too much Westworld on HBO, but it's something that seems to go hand in hand with comics and graphic novel creation. I've always had an infatuation with the Leonardo DaVinci, as well as the manner in which he designed, sketched and doodled. His life was one of the most amazing lived in human history as well, so it was an incredible pleasure to research and make a small creation based on him.
The android sketches done Davinci style started as stock images from Pixabay. They were animated style graphics, done on a transparent background. They can be found here: Male 1 - Male 2 - Female 1 - Female 2.
Inquisitor Conti is actually a real life actor that played Pope Sixtus IV, whou was The pope during Loeonard DaVinci's time. The image I used for his creation can be found here: Inquisitor Conti.
Leonard DaVinci's source image is that of a historic self-portrait that can be seen many places, on and off the internet. The one I used can be found here: Leonardo DaVinci.
DaVinci and Conti's imagery required a couple different methods in photoshop. The base layers for both were done in a charcoal texture technique that I worked the bugs out with this post:
The Panther Chameleon Snatching A Bug - Sketch Render Art
The tricky part was getting both to look similar enough to use face to face the way I did in the panel scenes. DaVinci started as an oil painting, but Conti was an actual modern day photograph. I had to render him with oil color layering first, then apply the pencil sketch renderings. Most of his layers required opacity and hue/saturation changes to match what Leonardo looked like.
The androids are a combination of of pencil and charcoal Photoshop sketch techniques and result in about a 15 layer PSD. The paper was one that I've had from a texture package I've had, but most background texture wallpaper will work. You make several copies of the same image, and render them to be different stroke or brush styles, then stack them. The hardest part is tweaking and adjusting each to look the way you want. Once you find it, save the image as a PSD doc and refer back to it to do the rest.