But here's a kind of step by step for how I did this one. Before beginning I entered the MARS bubble, meaning all four 30 Seconds To Mars albums are played in order, from start to finish, on a loop, with no interruptions.
1) I finished the design in pencil on A3 paper. (Close ups of the top and bottom half follow)
2) I happen to know someone with an A3 Scanner. You may be wondering "Why do you need to scan it?" and that's a good question. Simple answer is: I was being cowardly. I knew I wanted to do this in colour with pen but then the Inner Squirrel piped up with "What if it all goes horribly wrong?? Then what you going to do?" So I scanned it and did this on a printed version of the original (which is becoming the tonal version) So although the pic below looks the same as the one above it's not this is a printout.
3) Next I had to outline everything. I did this with a 0.5mm Pilot V5 HI-TECPOINT pen (not that you probably care what type of pen I used, but you know, thought I should mention it)
For anyone thinking of taking on a major outlining task like this, DON'T do it all in one sitting; it's not worth the hand cramp. Trust me.
4) Next I decided to fill in the areas that were solid black, just because. I used a Black Letraset Promarker.
Now the real fun starts! Bring on the 'pretty colours' !!
5) When it came to star colouring in I started with the roses. Not for any particular reason it just felt like the right place to start. The red areas of the roses have two different tones of red in the to create light, shade and tone. and then I used a contrasting orange to mix it up a bit on the edges/undersides, whatever you want to call them, areas.
All colours are Letraset Promarkers. I'm not going to list all the individual colours that I used for the simple fact that I don't remember, and you probably have better thing to do with yor time than read a list of coloured pens.
A closer look...
7) After the leaves came the vines, mainly because I still had all the green pens in front of me. The vines were done in slightly different shades of green to the leaves.
Fun fact: the order in which you lay the colours down has an effect the the end result colour. So although two of the three greens I used for the vines were the same as the ones I used on the leaves, because I changed the order order that I put them down the end colour was different.
8) After the vines came the thorns, the crowns and the heart.
I used a light pink for the Thorns, and an orange and two pinks for the crown.
The heart was the hard part. Three different tones of red went into filling it in with all the right shade and tone. It was actually quite stressful trying to get that part right; I had to walk away from it for about a week or so and look at it with fresh eyes. The light areas on the heart were created in a way I don't recommend. I used a Promarker Blender pen. Whis is essentially a pen filled with Alcohol. Promarkers are alcohol based pens and therefore when you add the Blender pen over the top of previous colours it breaks the inks down to what they were fresh out the pen nib adds more alcohol to it which then evaporates taking some of the ink with it.
So there you have it....
