The devourer of suns

I rather prefer Dark Phoenix from the comics than from X Men last stand. Famke Janssen is good, but the script lacks that cosmic thing I liked so much. So, let's put both things together ... step by step. 

 First things first, I need a drawing that looks like Famke Janssen's Phoenix. At least a bit, I hope. I did this in Photoshop and then passed it through Illustrator to filter my shaky pulse :P 

 Now I give flat colors to the BW sketch. Mostly red, you see :)

 

Now, for a bit of depth, shadow and light layers above the colored thing

We need a nice, cosmic nebula, so I just used a radial gradient from orange to black and a Clouds layer in Overlay mode to get this. I removed the borders to blend them into the background also.

An Phoenix is all about fire, you see? I just adapted the well known tutorial about how to write letters on fire to a white mask of Jean's contour. It's not as flashy as text, but it does the trick.

Of course, the sun devourer needs a supernova, so I went for a very simple tutorial on planet exploding which basically uses the same technique than the fire and introduced some modifications of my own.

Ops! No visible fire with all those explosions and such. And it took me a while to get there! So I change the layer mode and ... tadaaaaaa