A few week ago, we decided to do a local story for today's opening of the "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" movie. We thought it might be fun to ask some York County comic book fans, "What X-Men character would you be?"
In other words, who is your favorite and why. It's especially intriguing conversation with the X-Men, since the comic features such a diverse cast of characters, each with his or her own powers and personalities.
For art to go with the story, we convinced three comic book fans with good imaginations -- and a sense of humor to match -- to willingly dress up like X-Men. But they didn't walk in looking like they do in the photo above, so we thought you might enjoy seeing how graphic artist Carrie Hamilton made some simple costumes look like superhero disguises.
We wanted to find a way to show real people posing like the characters as a way to illustrate the story. 
Not being an authority on all things X-men, Carrie did a little online research to figure out the best way to have our models pose.
She wanted our models positioned in a way that would best show off their character's strengths. And since each of them was coming in individually, she wanted to make sure she could seamlessly blend all three of them into the same scene.
She printed out some reference images (shown to the right) and took them to our studio to give our photographers, Jason Plotkin and Bil Bowden, a good idea of what Carrie was looking for. Once the lighting was adjusted and the pose perfected we got our shot for each character.
Carrie and I thought the hard part would be finding people willing to dress and act like X-Men in our photo studio. But one call to the good folks at Comix Connection in the West Manchester Mall located three willing participants: Steve Adelson, 21, of York; Jim Mathison, 23, of West Manchester; and Erik Bowersox, 24, of Jackson Township.
Adelson was Cyclops.
Mathinson was Wolverine.
And Bowersox was Nightcrawler.
Then the fun began in Photoshop. Once the background was deleted each character got a separate layer in the Photoshop file. Then Carrie moved the characters around to make sure the image would fit within the dimensions we needed for printing in the newspaper.
Our models all had some costume elements that already make them look like an X-Men character; Carrie just had to add in the details.
She gave Cyclops his "optic blast" and adjusted his visor a bit to hide the eyes
She also added Wolverine's claws. We had debated over having our model actually hold kitchen knives or other pointy objects between his fingers to make it easier for me to get the placement correct. But we ended up without any extra props.
And then Nightcrawler (shown at right) required the most attention to get his skin to be the proper shade of blue. Bowersox had helpfully painted his face blue, so that gave Carrie a great base to start from.
Next she changed his pupils to a bright shade of yellow. Then she added a tail and the purple "BAMF" that surrounds Nightcrawler when he teleports. She added in some background and the lightning to give the image just the right level of superhero awesomeness. For those of you who are Photoshop savvy, Carrie used a combination of filters and color layers set on multiply to get the outlined comic book look to the image.
The page looks awesome. Thanks for sharing all the behind-the-scenes details Wade and Carrie!
Really? I could make something better in Photoshop in 5 mins
The cyclops costume is the only one that looks good. The picture effects look like Ass.
this should be redone. or just deleted.