With the original Batman’s death in Final Crises there were many theories of who would take on the mantel. With the conclusion of Battle for the Cowl we learn that Dick Grayson officially become the new Batman. Grayson is the original Robin who has been going by the the name of Nightwing for over 20 years now. In the new ongoing comic Batman and Robin “Batman: Reborn” written by Grant Morrison we get to see Grayson as the new Batman with Bruce Wayne’s son Damian as the new Robin.

A few months ago I did a character redesign of Batman. It was for an on-line contest by Project Rooftop tilted Batman 2.0: The Dynamic Do-Over. Check out the contest winners.  I’ve communicated with a few of the other contestants by Twitter, Deviant art and personal blogs. Although my redesign didn’t place I had a real blast with this project.

I posted my final redesign in a previous post. I’ve decided to post my sketches and show the stages of my work for fun.

These were my initial sketches of the redesign. I was looking for a way to incorporate Dick Graysons’ personality form his Nightwing costume into his new Batman costume. Playing with the bat symbol going across his chest, the colors of the suit and adding more compartments for the bat gadgets on his boots and gloves.

Here is my final pencil drawing. I had a lot of fun with this adding shadows and highlights.

This is my actual first digital inking of a comic character I’ve ever done. You’d think I would have done it before being a graphic designer for over 10 years. But I always seemed to keep my computer design skills and my comic penciling separate. For this project I decided to go for it and try inking in photoshop. It was fun and I think I did a good job. I’ve actually started digitally inking in Illustrator now. I like working with vector because the  inking never loses sharpness.

With the inking done I moved on to creating grey tone flats. Flats are done to help the digital coloring of the peice. this way you can select a whole area and color it quickly. For fun I tried different color schemes for Batman’s new look.

This is the final stage of my Batman 2.0 character redesign. Again this was my first comic digital coloring. So I’m very proud of how it came out. The drawing is competently colored with shadows and highlights.

I learned alot with this project, but most importantly I had alot of fun.  – Shazam!