'Comic Book' Portraits - Smith

I'm back for three glorious weeks this Christmas and went straight to my studio. And kitchen. Oh, and bedroom of course. Real blankets! Sleeping in past 5! It's nice to be home, but I've got work to do.

This is the first in a series of portraits I want to complete. They're based on people from my platoon and are going to be done in a variety of comic and graphic novel inspired styles. This one is sort of a Frank Miller - Sin City thing. It's also based on the Mad Men season three poster. Not bad for a start. I'm hoping to have enough good pieces by the time this one is done to submit some applications and get a show at some point.

A Real Comic

All right, so because I've been doing a few pictures in a graphic novel style I thought it was maybe about time I actually drew a comic figure. And I do love Batman, so I had a go. I really really love the background. It was just an afterthought, but it turned out great. Or at least it will when I put a bit of effort into the layout of it rather than just following the outline of the figure.

Over all I'm pleased with how it turned out. I think, though, I would like to play with it a bit more. I'm going to working with the positive/negative spaces a bit more (especially reversing them), get some starker contrasts, and a slightly more traditional outline. I'm also going to use a soft brush to put on the masking fluid instead of a pen, this has just a few too many sharp tiny lines. I like finished drawings that retain a very sketch-like appearance, but this just isn't quite polished enough.

This was where it started. I just did a very faint pen outline and erased all the pencil lines (learning from my self-portrait!). Then I put a whole bunch of masking fluid on. Next time I'm going to work up a nice strong outline, especially where the light is supposed to be hitting, and then use the masking fluid.

Then I covered it with scribbles, ink, navy and brown watercolour, and drops of ink. This is before the masking fluid came off. After I removed it I softened some of the white areas, strengthened some edges, dropped more ink on it, and added a bit of white charcoal.

JunoFest 2009

These were based on a photo a good friend of mine took at JunoFest in Vancouver last year and I finally put them up on Etsy. I loved that it has the guitars and drums signs at the very front, and both the Vogue and Orpheum theatres. Completely appropriate for a music fest!

It was originally one large picture but I didn't really like how that looked, and so eventually I decided to chop it apart and frame these parts separately. This was done in ink first, and even though I used waterproof ink it bled a fair bit when I put the watercolour over it as a underpainting. So on that went the conte and pastels. The red frames set off the colours nicely. I redid it later as one piece as well, and it turned out very well that time around (last picture), but part of me still likes these ones better. Sometimes the accidents are the best parts!