This is my second step by step thread, and it's about one of my all time idols, Vincent Price.
Bluewater comics have been publishing the anthology book VINCENT PRICE PRESENTS for a year now,
and for issue 26 the editor assigned writers Clay and Susan Griffith (The Tick, Klochak and the upcoming vampire novel "Vampire Empire) and me as the creative team in charge of the book.
We decided to use a character we developed together called THE RAVEN, something like THE SAINT meets DR STRANGE.
For the cover I decided to pay homage to the legendary EC comics and insert the supporting characters.
For Vincent I went for a Dirty Harry/James Bond look with his Webley revolver(loaded with silver bullets of course!)
Now the stages:
Step 1,first sketch
This is the first idea I had for the cover , the EC homage.
I ask the editor if he liked it and if there wasn't any problem copying another comic book trademark book,
and he had no problem at all.
But in case he didn't like it I sketched another cover, a more suggestive style
with only a hint of the werewolf theme with the pentagram.
This was Clay's favorite.
Here's a sketch for the werewolf, since Vincent Price is a classic screen hero/villain
I didn't thought a modern looking werewolf would look good so I decided for a classic (Hull/Chaney/Reed) look 
STEP 2 : The color sketch
I usually use a small A4 copy to paint the color rough, just to have an idea of what tones the illo will have.
STEP 3: The base colors.
I trace the sketch on a 300 gr Schoeller durex paper, the paper is from Germany and it's rather expensive.
The first color I use is Ecoline inks sienna, a dirtier type of yellow, here you can see the original image of Vincent that I used for the portrait, it's from Haunted Palace.
After the sienna , I use the most important ink, burnt sienna, very washed for the skin tones.
And sepia for shadows, the hair and the all important "anchovy" mustache.
STEP 4 :Pencils
This is my favorite technique, pencils over inks, it's the one I feel more confortable. I should take more risks, but I leave the risktaking techniques for my artsy fartsy paintings.
I'm very impatient so I have to finish the stare before I start with other sections of the illo.
Here's the finished face. A little white acrylic for the highlights on the hair and eyes.
STEP 5: The featured characters.
The typical EChorror cover featured the ghoulunatics, so I put Annabelle, an incubbus, and Von Horn , the werewolf.
Annabelle's look is kinda based on german actress Marissa Mell (Danger diabolik, Gangsters in London) one of the sexiest actress of the 60's
STEP 6 : Pencils for the characters and ink colors for the gargoyle and revolver.
I found this beautiful image of a gargoyle but the location of the staute wasn't identified,
the revolver is a Webley, I love drawing that gun,
it's famous for being the official british handgun for over a century
and it was used by movie heroes like Indiana Jones, Lawrence of Arabia and 007.
Not a gun enthusiast myself, but I enjoy drawing them.
STEP 7 Background.
I used cool colors, greens and blues to contrats with the warm colors on the character faces and the reds of the title header.
The circle of the characters is not a perfect circle like EC's,
didn't want to copy the ECl ook exactly so I used a spiked circle instead, I think it looks nice.
A little bleech sprinkled around the edges to give an old look and voila!
We have a cover!
Here's the close up of a scanned section, I have to scan the A3 sized illustration about 7 times to cover it all
and then put join them together with photoshop, I used to have them scanned but I was never satisfied with how they did it
so I had to learn how to use that damn photoshop myself. That was harder than painting the bloody thing!
Here's the final scan, sans title, the design folks at Bluewater haven't send it to me yet.
Hope everyone enjoy this step by step, hope someone find it useful and here's a few pages and sketches for your entertainment.
