Busy Saturday

After a pretty crappy and stressy week, spent the day drawing yesterday...I'm slowly rediscovering the joy of drawing just for drawing's sake but these pieces were all done for specific reasons. From the top:

The top three are character designs so these characters will appear fairly soon. The top two pics are obviously the same character, the first being an experiment to see how a different nightgown would look form the second. In my mind, the latter was always what was going to be used anyway and I think looks much better...the lady in red was interesting as I'm not used to drawing buxom, curvaceous women but think it came out ok...

Tinkerbell is this week's entry for the Weekly Themed Art Blog, had to rush it through yesterday or else it wouldn't get done...

I wasn't happy with the rush job backdrop for my recent Amethyst, she seemed to be just plonked in so I spent time doing a new backdrop. It's still not perfect but I think looks less half arsed than the original...

Final two are illustrations for a housing association project, two done, two to go. Quite happy with the bird actually...

May The Devil Take Ya

Bad News/Good News...

I've been circling towards doing a graphic novel adapting some of Manly Wade Wellman's short stories of Silver John/John the Balladeer for a while and had cleared projects to start with some two-pagers in a week or so. I presumed the character was in the public domain as there was no copyright notice in the recent collection I read and could find no mention of anything online.

Gearing up for it, I dove back to do a deeper search to find that there is an agent for Wellman's estate but there is already a graphic novel adaptation in the works.

While a little annoying (I was looking forward to that!), it means I can refocus on my own project instead. I want to do two projects at the same time so if I get bored with one, I can flip to the other, but need to come up with a fun adventure to work with. I have tons of dialogue and scenes worked out for my main project, now to start thumbnailing some pages. This will be the one drawn cleanline, so could be a bit of a challenge for me...especially as I still don't have a title or first name for the main character(s)!

January Update

Been a few weeks since my last post, but have been quite productive art wise, along with being busy generally, so thought I'd post some stuff.

As well as three pages for Too Much Sex And Violence #3 and continued contributions to the Weekly Themed Art Blog, I've spat out the above pieces:

From the top: a modern twist on Harvey Comics' Black Cat. I've been following a blog featuring artists submitting their own redesigns of Superhero costumes and decided to submit a few of my own. I'd drawn a few tweaked characters here and there before (the Sharon Ventura Ms Marvel, Gypsy Moth) but felt like doing a few new submissions. I wasn't looking at great pieces of art, just getting the costume down so won't post the others I did (maybe later), but I'm fairly happy with the art on this one.

Just finished reading Esperanza, the latest Jaime Hernandez Love and Rockets collection and fancied drawing something in his style. It was weird drawing with my wider-nibbed pens but I think this gives a nice Hernandez-finish. Getting the art right in the first place was the hard part, surprisingly difficult smacking down the urge to add definition but with Jaime, less is more.

Finally, Niko (from Runaways) and Amethyst. During my art save period recently, I unearthed earlier drawings of these two characters that I couldn't save (for instance, Amethyst being done for the A-Z of comic characters thread a few years ago and drawn at A5 wasn't suitable for saving) but wanted to do decent drawings of.

Niko is OK but still not great so no doubt I'll return to do a final pass but having started an earlier version of Amethyst a few weeks ago (sketch posted in a recent post), I decided it was just too stiff and no matter what I did, wasn't worth trying to save. Instead, I started over from scratch and am quite happy with the results, especially as I was using new pens instead of my usual Pilots. My natural habit was to fill in clothing creases on the dress and add shading but I decided to keep the art pared down and despite the annoying urge to doodle with the dress, I'm quite happy with this actually. I added a really quite backdrop just for a change but think I prefer the figure on its own.

Following Amethyst's abandonment and subsequent success, think I'll be erasing the Rogue I did at the same time and starting almost over from scratch on that too (though I really like the head so will be keeping that)...

January Blues

Well, back to work after tomorrow after a stonking 10 days off and I'm not sure whether it's the thought of a year kicking off with personal problems going on or just the thought of going back to work after having a relatively hassle free time off...but whichever, not looking forward to tomorrow.

Tried drawing just for fun earlier and got stuck at the pencil stages...the figures just weren't flowing despite numerous tweaks so I'll probably just start all over again (though I like both heads, particularly Rogue's). Amethyst was part of my art save thing but as the original was A5 and done for the A-Z of heroes project going a few years ago, this is less a save and more (actually) a whole new drawing. I also plan on redrawing Nico from Runaways but after these (and two others that can wait)are done, time to refocus on sequential stuff again...had an expert tutorial in lettering, will be interesting to see how much I remember when it comes to that stage!

I've also bunged up a pic I saw on Bleeding Cool yesterday, Erica Durance as Wonder Woman from some David E Kelly show: hmm, while great as Lois, I think she'd be a good Wondy too...