Another Super-Hero Drawing

I'll put this below the fold for those of you who don't want to read about super-hero drawings (I'm kind that way). But I recently re-imagined an old character that people have told me they liked in the past, kind of like my own "Batman" remake. Of course I don't get paid bajillions of dollars to do so, unlike Hollywood moguls, but I bravely did it anyway.

The character on top to the right is "Earth", which I drew way back in 1996, almost ten years ago. The concept was of an earth elemental spirit, come to inhabit a physical form and setting out to fight all sorts of environmental injustice. (Al Gore, are you reading this?! What a great spokes-hero for "An Inconvenient Truth"!)

I recently had a chance to imagine him a bit differently. The idea had always been that he would have a younger sidekick, a young man who had voluntarily taken on the earth spirit, kind of a physical anchor for the elemental to inhabit during his journeys above-ground. So in the new version (at the right in both color and black-and-white) I incorprated him as well as the new version of Earth. I was very, very happy with the way this turned out.

I am learning to incorporate more real-world textures and shading into Photoshop illustrations. I'm working my way towards understanding how to make these more "painterly", rather than just looking like flat-color comic book panels, but that's been more difficult than I'd thought it would be.

Still, this is a pretty cool update, in my humble opinion. I hope you enjoy it.