Girl's Finest commission

This was commissioned some months ago. I AM NOT CURRENTLY ACCEPTING COMMISSIONS. Please do not contact me with a commission request! I will post a notice on this blog when/if I take on any more commissions. Thanks!!!

Sketches on toned paper

A couple of fair maidens to try out/use up some toned paper I've had sitting around for ages.

Padme detail and pencil drawing

Here is a detail shot and the pencil drawing for the Padme piece.

Sketch of a Ziegfeld girl with flowers

Wolf

A little wolf sketch just for fun. I might draw more animals.

Silk Spectre Thumbs

I have tons and tons of thumbnails for many of the covers I have done over the years. They almost always start as very small (2 or 3 inches tall) sketches in my sketchbook or on loose bond paper. I often scan them and add some color in Photoshop to help sell the concept, but sometimes I just send in sketchy pencils, as in these thumbs for the Silk Spectre cover I did recently.

This collection of 8 poses is what I sent to DC to pick from, and we wound up with number 7 as the first choice, with 8 as an alternate if I preferred. I stuck with 7 and turned in the finished cover a few days later.

CHEEKY ELF

UNFINISHED

Once again, it has been too long since my last post. That means I've been working too much on stuff I can't share and not drawing anything new that I can share. Well, I have to move that Dragonborn post down the page somehow, so here are a couple of sketches I came up with a while back but never finished.

I drew the Berry Faery several months ago. I remember feeling kind of down one evening when I was struggling to draw, so I abandoned whatever it was I was working on and picked up a new sheet of paper and sketched out the figure on this sketch without much thinking. To my surprise, she looked pretty good, so I quickly snapped a photo of the page with my iMac (didn't feel like messing with the scanner) and sketched in the rest of the concept digitally. I was all fired up to finish it when I hit a wall- I couldn't decide if I should attempt to paint the final piece traditionally (my initial instinct) or to just do my usual digital thing. I put it on the back burner and eventually abandoned it.

The Medusa was another misfire. The idea for a Medusa portrait just popped in my head one day, and I could see it pretty clearly. I drew the figure in pencil without reference, thinking I would get something stylish and pushed like the image in my mind, but much to my dismay, my pencil was stuck on "realistic" and I wound up with this boring portrait of some lady. I scanned it and tried to make it work in Photoshop, but only made it worse by adding more rendering and lighting to increase the photo-realism factor. It was going even more in the wrong direction, so I had to abandon it completely. There is just no way to "stylize" something after the fact. You have to go big in the first place and whittle it down.

Perhaps given the time and motivation I will revisit these two ladies, but for now, they are living on the island of misfit drawings.

On a side note, some folks have been asking about original art sales. I am working on a new online shop and hope to have it up soon. I'm going to be selling whatever remaining comic art I have, including covers and a few interior pages, along with some sketches and the like. I'm still figuring out the print situation, but hopefully I will be able to offer some prints, too. I'll post another notice when I get closer to putting the shop online, so interested parties should stay tuned.

Thanks as always for stopping by. I'll try to come back soon.

Scarlet Witch

Here is one more red sketch I neglected to post earlier- Scarlet Witch. It was done at the same time as the Poison Ivy and Red Sonja, and just like those two it is color pencil and marker.

I don't know anything about Scarlet Witch, but I had a lot of red markers and she was the only other red character I could think of at the moment. I probably should have stuck with a faerie or something. That'll be next.

Poison Ivy

Here's a scan of another one of these color sketches, this time of Poison Ivy. Well, it really could be any red-haired nature girl, but the foliage is poison ivy, so I figure that's enough. Ivy was actually the first one I did, followed by a Scarlet Witch, and then the Red Sonja. Apparently, I like red.

Also posted is a scan of the Red Sonja, as requested in the comments. I couldn't quite capture the subtleties of the original with my scanner, which I now realize is not great at color images. I'll have to upgrade if I keep working in color. Damn.

Now that I am getting a little more comfortable with my materials, I plan on tackling some more involved subjects and more refined drawings. We'll see what happens.

I'll post the Scarlet Witch once I get a good scan.

As always, thanks for stopping by.

Red Sonja

Bugs

Faerie

Random sketches

Long walk

Here is a little digital sketch done primarily with Painter, with a touch of Photoshop here and there. Once again, I was just experimenting a bit between jobs. I didn't give much thought to the composition and it is a little too symmetrical as a result, but I did make an effort to keep it simple and to stay away from making tons of global adjustments or playing around with filters, instead trying to choose the right colors and put them in the right places.

It's not spectacular, but at least it pushes Hitchcock down a notch.

As always, thanks for stopping by.

Joshua

Girl in black

Continuing the series of character designs started with the last post. Ink and Photoshop. I don't think she will mind me saying that all of these characters are based on descriptions by the gracious Barbara Canepa.

Characters

I noticed these images were saved as a draft I never got around to posting. I can't recall if I shared some of these in another post, so forgive me if there are some repeats in here. These are some character designs I was working on a while back. The project hasn't been realized, so I won't say too much about these drawings, other than they were drawn in pencil and colored in Painter.

Enjoy.

Joshua

Phone Sketches

Digital Hana sketch

Elric commission