A couple of months ago, Kevin Eastman had a cool idea for an upcoming cover for one of the IDW TMNT comic books -- he "reimagined" the cover of the very first Mirage Studios TMNT comic book, with a slightly different scene. This new version depicted the Turtles in different poses -- as Kevin described it, "ten seconds later", after they'd briefly paused on that rooftop on the first cover, and then leapt into battle.
He asked me if I would ink it, and I took him up on it. The process was much like the last few things we've worked on together -- he scanned his pencil drawing and sent me the file, which you see here...
I downloaded that file and printed it out on an 11 by 17 sheet of white card stock, using the color printer at Mirage to render it in as close a hue to "non-reproducing Photo-Blue" as I could approximate.
I inked this version, using a couple of different fine-point brush pens, and I tried to get close to the way Kevin inked the drawing on that first Mirage TMNT comic book. It required a LOT of little hatch marks, and took quite a while, but I liked the way it came out. Here's the scan I made of the inked drawing, showing some of the blue lines…
… and here it is cleaned up and turned into a purely black and white bitmap version.
The finished, printed cover featured nice colors by Ronda Pattison, with a palette similar to that of the original cover, and here's what it looked like. -- PL
