I've been sadly neglecting this poor blog over the past few months. But fear not - there's still been a lot of art happening. In a development that I didn't see coming at all, I've fallen in love with illustration again.
I just wanted to get back to doing more drawing, because after two years of focusing on acrylics, it felt like my drawing skills were getting a little rusty. For every painting that I'd spend hours and hours on, there would generally only be 15-20 minutes of drawing at the beginning, if that.
So, armed with my trusty pencils and a sketchpad, I started off by redesigning Supergirl:
I wanted to make her more down-to-earth, and I wanted to bypass all the near-kiddie-porn aspects of her current comics, so a more normal physique, hair and glasses were the key.
After that I realized how much I'd missed combining analog and digital illustration, so I plunged right into another one:
A little marker illustration, a little photography, a little bourbon and a lot of Photoshop. Good times, good times.
At this point I started poking through my reference material and my unfinished-projects files. This girl in the parka was an idea for a painting that I had last summer, but apparently it got shelved in favour of some other project:
Around this point I got the idea of putting a bunch of these together in a book. There're lots of print-on-demand options these days, so my plan now is to do 20-30 of these pieces for publication. I'm aiming for late spring/early summer. Hopefully I haven't bitten off more than I can chew.
A couple more recent pieces that I want to put in the book:
The Viking woman is a reworking of an old illustration from 3 years ago. Initially I planned to just tweak a few details, but I ended up re-inking the whole thing, keeping the basic face and helmet, changing the hair, adding the fur and the chain and the sword, rotating the composition, ditching all the colour fills, and adding the red and orange colour holds. That may sound like a lot of work, but the whole thing didn't take more than an hour or so.
So there we have it. Lots more drawing for me to do if I'm gonna pull this off.
Wish me luck.
