Random Stuff From the Top of My Head and the Tip of My Pen

Odds and ends once again....

Here'e Merv from The Dreaming in a rare moment of rest....



Stardancer...no relation to Silver Surfer or Spider Robinson.



Meanwhile, this jovial T-Rex about town is submitted as proof of why I shouldn't let my mind wander too far while sketching...

Back to the Drawing Board...

I started doing some housecleaning of my file cabinet a couple of months ago, and as usual got distracted by something shiny and didn't finish. Time to get some more of this stuff out of my way, so here we go....

First of all, here's a very old one...from sometime in the 1990, more precisely. It's very rough, and my sense of form still needed a lot of work here. Still, it was fun to do at the time. I'm working on a color version of this piece that I'll upload another time.



More on the same theme, and from about the same time. I was really getting off on Giffen and Maguire's take on Justice League at the time, and this piece shows it. Even now it remains one of the funniest comic books I've ever read.
Interestingly, this is also one of the first pieces where I realized that my left-handedness was causing me a perspective problem. Anything I drew with a vertical composition had a tendency to lean to the right as it went up. I shudder to think how many right-leaning drawings I inadvertently did prior to realizing this. I've since solved the problem by starting any drawing with ruled lines showing the visual and actual centers of the page or panel.



Here's a much more recent (within the last two years) take on the big three of the JLA. This one takes some inspiration from Alex Ross. One of the things that strikes me about Ross's work is that he's one of the few painters I've seen who's not afraid to paint with black. I was always told that true black shouldn't be used in a painting, but I suppose Ross's success shows that rules are made to be broken.
The trinity of DC icons holds a lot of intrigue for me, above their individual stories. I once wrote a paper for a literature course that theorized that characters like this have achieved a status as true modern myths, and I still hold to that idea. There's clearly archetypal ideas behind these characters that provide them a sort of immortality that transcends artistic interpretation or sales figures. Some artists, such as Ross, are better than others at capturing that quality.