Step 2: Inks Complete

So here it is with finished inks:

The picture robs you of some of the minute details, but I think you get the idea.

As usual, all of the tighter stuff pencil-wise wound up looking pretty good like the upper arm and the face. I pretty much wing it when it comes to cloth with a lot of black (as in the cape of this wizard/ ghost/ thing), but I think it looks fine here. I might go in with a whiteout pen and place in some cracks or little details in there, but I'm trying to let go and just let it live on its own. The ink I was using is pretty old, though so you can spot a lot of inconsistencies with the value of the blacks, but whatever.

I guess the only thing that really bugs me is that the swirling vortex of evil- sort of background wound up being a little bit busy and takes away from the foreground a little bit, but that's all because I decided to live on the edge and do that on the fly, too. Originally, it was just going to be blank back there with some detail lines and some sweat/ blood spurts to make it look like they were really going at it, but I thought that might be sort of chickening out. Not that this is the most elaborate background, but having nothing there at all seemed kind of weak.

Still, for the first pinup kind of thing I've done in a couple of years I think it wound up being ok. Now I have to decide if I'm going to color it, and I'm not so hot at that stuff. I can probably lay down some watercolor or marker and make it look ok, but I just don't have a lot of skill any more and I'm too afraid to blow it this far in.

Mighty

A few (read: many) years ago, a couple of musicians that I worked with decided that they would record a prog metal EP. Mostly, this was an ironic joke: all of them were trained jazz musicians (and pretty good ones) with the only earnest member of the ad hoc trio being a classic rock tone poem enthusiast as a kid, which found its way to inform his choice of profession. As you may have guessed, he was also the writer. So I how was I involved in this? Since I have pretty much zero talent for music, they thought it funny to have a sort of over -the-top Manowar-style sword and sorcery cover for the five or six discs they were planning on burning, so they asked me to throw something together. Here's what came out:

Yes, there's some strange anatomy going on right there. Since this is pushing 15 years old at this point, and everyone's their own worst critic, I don't think it's unfair to say that this is one of the butt ugliest things I've ever seen. Still, it was my way of learning some of the basics of Photoshop (many of which I've forgotten), and they really dug it, so it wasn't a total loss.

As another kind of gag, I put together two or three redone covers for the writer guy. The music industry of the late 90s/ early 2000s just loved to repackage recently released material with special covers, so I jumped on board and did this:

I liked this one better, but probably because it was just separate scans of other stuff I sketched out that I cobbled together on a computer. The guy in the back was colored with markers and the spiky haired dude in the foreground was all magic wand and paint can. Except he doesn't have any ears. That's a little strange.

Anyway, so I haven't even thought about these since I made them and they've recently kind of resurfaced. Me being a dope that just can't let go, I've been a little inspired in the last week to do a sort of weird follow up. Let's call it the art for their never-to-be-released anniversary boxed set:

 

I wish I would have taken a pic of this in its primordial sketch form. I'm not really a great inker to begin with, and penciled images just seem to have a different dynamic to me; they're more exciting. This isn't the clearest picture, but I was about half done with the inks before taking it. Since I don't have a ton of time on my hands anymore, I sometimes doodle this stuff out during my lunch breaks, which gives me a solid hour to nail down a composition and decide where things need to be tighter and which parts can be looser. The sketch happened on Monday, and the beginning ink section went down on Tuesday. I finished inking it yesterday, so I'll put up a pick of that sometime later today or tomorrow.