Magic Fortnight: Raven

This started as a pose notion, and I was maybe halfway through before I realized I had done much the same angle and character with Sistah Spooky. Oh well.

Those arms are confusing, but I think the shading is coming along. Since she's a Teen Titan, I wanted her to have different proportions from someone in, say, Fully Grown Titans.

This leaves me with only two blank pages in the current notebook. Time to crack open a new one.

Magic Fortnight: Finishing Thor

Done and done.

Yeah. I'm OK with this.

Magic Fortnight: Beginning Thor

The first sketch is in my standard sketchbook size, and it seemed like an easy exercise in camera angles. But he now looks very squat. The foreshortening doesn't quite work. My thunder god is a Tolkein dwarf. Also, that head is a tad simian.

I made a new sketch with the same pose on the larger sketchbook, and I decided to do all the simple linework before doing any shading. Then I can add that incrementally and hopefully avoid the heavy-handed finishing that makes my work seem stiff and drab.

The feet look farther away, boosting that illusion of depth. And presumably he's now very, very tall.

Oh, and, hey, a background!

I'll post the finished work when it's, well, finished.

Magic Fortnight: Sistah Spooky

Sistah Spooky is from Adam Warren's Empowered (link possibly NSFW), a comic I look to these days as I tweak my style. I don't want to ape Warren's work, but I can certainly learn to loosen my corpse-stiff linework. Also, I'm very tempted to print my comic direct from pencils.

Spooky is a minority high-school student trapped on a campus dominated by cruel cheesecake blondes. She discovers they each made a deal with a demon for physical perfection, and she wants in. She gets the same physical upgrade (in exchange for her soul), but the demon gives her too much mojo, and she goes into business as a bitter superheroine. She hates Empowered, another cheesecake blonde.

This is my first pass at a Spooky sketch, and I wasn't happy with the flat hand placement and the face. The arms should be bent more, forcing the hands higher and foreshortening the arms. You can see that I didn't finish it; that's Empowered herself on the top left.

I went with a pose that forced me to consider the cape and arms to balance the stance. I played a bit more with shading and highlights. It's progress, but it's a small increment forward. Maybe I just don't like her mask's eyes.

Magic Fortnight: Hellboy

Wait, isn't he more of a horror character than magic?

Wait again, isn't he kinda scifi? Or fabulist?

The beauty of Mike Mignola's character is that the franchise goes where he wishes and takes on genre trappings as it requires. But he's definitely magic. He's fighting changelings and dragons and witches. That's magic.

Wait, isn't that more adventure?

See, anything Mignola wants it to be.

The original sketch for this felt pretty good until I set it down and approached it a few hours later.

That's more of a Superman pose. It had to go.

I moved to a larger sketchbook to work big and to play around with markers and pens. The usual sketch sizes are 5.5 x 8.5. This one is 11 x 14.

I think this one turned out not too badly. Not bad for a piece done between periods of calming a sick baby.