Sketch to More Finished Sketch

Well, I figured I'd follow Jake's post with a look into my process.

So this week for Cover to Cover with Jon Foster, we had to do a cover to Wolverine: Netsuke.

First step was to work up a bunch of thumbnails and send them off to Jon:


I liked the thumbnail in the top left (boxed blue) which had Wolverine over the crest of a hill, mostly in silhouette, with a bonzai-ish tree to the left some flames and smoke in the distance with crows, etc. Jon felt it wasn't "covery" enough and told me to go with one of two others. The one of the two he suggested that I chose is boxed in red. It's Wolverine seated drinking tea, with an image of Mariko's face above him. If you haven't read the comic, the first issue, at least is for the most part a quiet, introspective comic, with one fight in which Wolverine uses a sword (not even his claws!) and there are no bodies. So I felt the typical Wolverine, claws out, looking badass, with piles of bodies around him, didn't really fit.

Here was a pencil sketch I did in my sketchbook trying to work out his pose:


After taking a look at this, I felt his posture was a little too erect and not quite the mood I was looking for. Also, it looked like a normal size guy with Wolverine hair, rather than the runty sized guy that Wolverine is supposed to be.

Now for for the final piece, I decided to try a new (for me) method, and created the underdrawing with charcoal pencil, hopefully allowing me to establish the darks I can never do with graphite. I dropped his head down a bit and sloped his shoulders on the final sketch, adding in the actual type from the comic to try to get a sense of how it would fit:


So I took the drawing in, along with some quick digital color flats I had done over it, to class for crit, figuring I'd make the changes suggested in crit, fix it, then go in with acrylics.

Today we had some guest critics, artists: Greg Manchess, Dan Dos Santos, and Tor books art director Irene Gallo.

They had some good suggestions including getting better reference photos for the hands and lap, and choosing to either go realistic with the rendering of Mariko at the top or go Japanese wood block print. Right now, the feeling was, that Mariko was kind of neither here nor there with that choice.

So I'm gonna go back and make those changes, along with a few other minor details, and then fix this down and see how painting acrylic over it goes. The whole thing's been an adventure and one that I'm enjoying so far. On the whole it's been more successful (so far) than some of my forays into other media heh. I'm really liking the charcoal pencils, and I think, if nothing else, I'm definitely gonna stick with them for a while.