Hey Creatives! Welcome to this weeks’ edition of Tutorial Tuesday! We’re teaching you how to make a super-cute vector of the one and only, Tony Stark of Marvel’s Iron Man. This particular design is based of FUNKO POP’S FIGURINES for Iron Man 3. Check out the figurine here!
I’ve been really getting into collecting these things and I’ve kick started my collection with Tony. I thought they’d be interesting to vector, so I’ve gone ahead and written up a tutorial.
PART 01.
Make a rectangle in a flesh color! I used: #FFEEE1. After you create the rectangle, hit the DIRECT SELECTION TOOL (A) – and click a bottom corner. On the top of the menu bar, there should be a button that lets you convert the selected point to “Smooth” instead of “Corner”. Select that and do the same for both bottom corners. I didn’t edit any other settings.
PART 02.
I then created an oval with the fill color: #FFE8D5 – for the ears. I transformed it a little bit, so that it would slant. I then copied it and used the reflect tool to put it on the other side of head. I then moved both ears behind the head.
PART 04.
Tony Stark is incomplete without crazy hair and his scruff. For the hair, I created sections and grouped them together with the pen tool. I would combine sections using the Pathfinder tool by selecting the shapes I wanted to join up together and pressing ‘Merge’. They’re basically a bunch of polygon shoved together and merged. I used black. For the goatee, I created a path and drew it on the face. This path had no fill, just a stroke. I used the “Tapered Stroke” at 0.75. I also created the nose for reference by making a triangle with the color #FFE8D5.
PART 05.
We now start to build the body. The first step is to start with a base and get the basic shapes in. Focus on refining one side because we’ll slice it later. I first started making the base of the armor using the color: #BE1E2D. This was again made by creating shapes and using the path finder tool to merge the shapes together.
PART 06.
I created a new layer and added more polygons for the plates of the armor. Again, I only really kept the focus to one side. The plates were filled with: #FEC368.
PART 06.
I needed a darker gold for the other plates, so I created more polygons with the color: #E3A553. Using the same process, I created more plates with a darker red – #BF1E2D. The armor had patches of silver details, so I made more polygons using: #DCDDDE and #BCBEC0. The foot was also adjusted because it was looking awkward. I placed an Arc Reactor for reference but didn’t included it when I had to slice.
PART 07.
Since I was pretty happy with the left side of the image. I then grouped everything together. Copy + Pasted it and put it next to each other. I created a rectangle to cover the side I was satisfied with. Selected everything, right clicked and selected “Make Clipping Mask.” I then selected the side, duplicated and reflected it.
PART 08.
I aligned the two together. I then Duplicated it again and changed the fill to a black and white linear gradient and set them next to each other.
PART 09.
I opened up Photoshop, and put them on top of each other. I set it to “Color Burn”. This was how it looked.
PART 09.
It was looking a little too shiny. So I wanted to give it a more cartoony look. I duplicated the gradient layer and went to Filter > Add Noise. I then hit CTRL/CMD + U, to open up Hue and Saturation. Make sure ‘Colorize’ is selected, and gave my noise filter a warm red. I then set it to Soft Light. I created the Arc Reactor on top. I created a circle with a white fill and placed it on his chest. I duplicated the circle and gave it a small Gaussian Blur. I then gave it a dark red stroke.
FINAL IMAGE:
Tony looked awfully lonely alone so using the exact same techniques, I slipped Pepper in there!
If you want to read more tutorials like this, you can check out last week’s edition of Tutorial Tuesday. Like it? Love it? We hope this tutorial has helped you in some way! Whether you liked it, loved it or thought you could have done it better – let us know in the comments. If you’ve made anything using this tutorial, let us know in the comments!