Luke Cage - Hero for Hire
I recently went on a binge-read of some of the early "Hero for Hire" and "Power Man" comics from the 70's, and I decided to do a piece in the same vein as those early tales.
It took me awhile to "get" Cage. When I was a kid I started with his 80's adventures, which weren't that good IMO. I wondered why people loved Cage so much. It was only when I went back and read those early stories that I saw what other people saw. Something crazy was always happening in the hood in those stories, and even though I found myself shaking my head at some of the racist stuff, it was the 70's, and they were trying, so I just laughed it off.
I wanted this one to be more "comic style" and less real, so I actually completed the art itself pretty quickly. I used Daz Studio for the figure, then created the brick wall in Blender. I rendered the whole thing in Daz, then used Blender's Freestyle renderer to get the linework. After that I had to recreate the original Hero for Hire logo in Illustrator.
Luke Cage bustin' through! It doesn't matter what you put in his way, he just keeps on coming!
Just the Cage model. I had a really annoying time modeling his shirt for some reason.
The brick wall I made in Blender with the "Wall Factory" feature. Worked out better than I had hoped.
This is the Freestyle line rendering from Blender. I made about a million of these during this project.
One of the first Daz Studio renders of the finished Cage model.
One of the many Freestyle Blender renders of this pose.
I just made this fun piece to celebrate finally getting this one done.
The whole scene set up in Daz.
The working scene in Blender for the Freestyle lines.