2AM Blues

Another late-night paint sketch that started with throwing down some random brush strokes and seeing what emerged. It's a fun and spontaneous exercise.


Us humans are a narcissistic breed. We tend to see our likeness in the most abstract shapes (take Scott McCloud's example in Understanding Comics, a smiley for instance :) ), so it's probably not too surprising that it ended up looking that way to me and I reinforced what I thought I saw.


This dude was the end result. With this cropping I thought it looked a bit like a CD jacket.

The progress shot shows that the painting was started in the template I use for my work on Twelfth Night. I've been thumbnailing for the last few days. It's probably the most challenging and creatively demanding step in the comic creation process for me, but that also makes it the most rewarding. If the underlying structure is boring every step in the process to follow, from pencilling to inking to toning, will feel like a drag because I know that the page will be lacking no matter what.

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Scott McCloud: scottmccloud.com
Understanding Comics: Amazon - Mandatory reading for any comic fan

Bizarre pair

A late-night paint sketch in Photoshop.
It started with random brush strokes which I kept building on until I saw something emerge. I was going to save some intermediate steps but forgot after the first one.


I was trying to make the global values read well, but I think the details ended up overshadowing the general composition. Maybe I started shading too early.
Time taken ~ 1.5 hours.