How to Draw the Joker in Cape and Cowl

I've been noodling around with digital painting lately. This is something I'd started sometime in the Spring and only returned to it in the last week or so. I saw a piece by my hero Barry Windsor-Smith in which the Joker is wearing Batman's ill-fitting cape and cowl, while joker playing cards rain down on him. For the life of me, I can't remember where I saw it- online somewhere. I laid everything out quickly, then hit a few snags so I abandoned it for a while. Coming back after a hiatus I think I worked through some of my problems.

Baker Street Muse

Another sketch I scanned in hopes of fleshing out as a digital painting. I drew several sketches of robots looming over cityscapes. This one fizzled as soon as I needed to get serious about the perspective. I'm attracted to the design of the robot though, it's somewhere between Mr. Krabbs of Spongebob fame, and a samurai something.

Practical Headgear

Speaking of headgear, this is very close to the kind of contraption I used to wear at night when I had braces .... but seriously, folks- enclosed are the scanned sketch and digital final from a year or so ago. I was falling into the trap I see a lot with digital painters and that's the tendency to paint foreground figures extremely dark and suggest details with minimal highlights. It works most of the time but I began to feel I was using it as a cheat and quit for a while.

Botley Crew

From a few years ago. I was doing a lot of work on photoshop with a Wacom Tablet. About every good sketch got scanned so that I could work them up as a photoshop painting. I soon dropped that habit and began drawing directly on the Wacom.
This was an idea I had for a pirate crew made up of robots with a saucy female captain. If I dig up that sketch book I'll ink it, as I think it's a better drawing than a painting.

Beginning Backwards

And so, I begin a blog which is primarily about drawing, with a digital painting. I admit to having mixed feelings about digital work. I'm old, and a fuddy-duddy, and it'd be just like me to avoid a perfectly good tool just for the sake of principal. It appeals to my lazy nature. I can sit down, open Photoshop, paint wildly for 10-15 minutes, then walk away with no mess to clean up.

It had been a while since I'd been able to paint digitally. My wife attended her 1st year of Law School this year, and we share one laptop, so guess who had to wait his turn. A new P.J. Harvey cd caught my eye and I decided to break in with something easy. I began on a toned background and sketched in the basic shapes. I soon realized I was trying to draw the painting, so I widened by brush stroke considerably and dove in to the shadows. I gradually tweaked some of the mid-tones and tightened some of the features, saving the highlights for last. The white hatching over the background is a swipe from J. C. Leyendecker. Steal from the best!

I read an interview with a hot-shot "conceptual designer" from Denmark who advised against using too many layers in Photoshop. He was producing some intricate work, yet claimed to use only 3-4 layers at most. This has helped me immensely! Tone the background, draw/paint on the next layer, and save additional layers for experimental lighting or anything you may feel unsure about. This has helped me keep my pieces fresh (I think) and spontaneous. It also saves a lot of time not having to waddle around a dozen layers every time you want to add a stroke.