Tales of a Checkered Man

Hello friends. As you may have read here on the site previously, I'll be a guest at the upcoming MSU Comics Forum on February 4th. This year, I wanted to do something fun and special specific to this event. My idea was to create a print exclusive to the event itself (it may be the only comics event I attend in 2012)!

Follow me as I post the progress of developing a special SQUID-GIRL print in various stages.

Stage 1: Rough Sketches

Stage 2 is taking the rough sketch I liked (at left) and developing it a little more. I decided to go with something not as frisky because I personally don't want to devolve the image of the character into a simple pin-up girl. So I went this route instead. I wanted something that kept the characters fun personality intact but within a traditional superhero-like, Bruce Timm-esque way. So I went right to the source. This sketch was based off of a drawing of Batgirl by Timm which captures the essence perfectly.

From this point I went ahead and decided to jump right into penciling the image. I enlarged the sketch (at left) on a photocopier to fill an 8.5x11 sheet of paper (approximately) and adheared that copy onto the back side of a piece of Strathmore 300 series smooth Bristol board. Typically this isn't how I pencil my artwork, but I really liked the energy from this sketch and I wanted to capture as much of it as possible. I used my light table to rough in the figure with a 4h lead. It's hard on my eyes to look into the bright light of the light table for too long so once I felt like I'd captured what I was looking for in the copied sketch I moved on to my drawing table to tighten up the drawing. The results are below. The 4h lead is light and the final penciled artwork was adjusted in Photoshop to better show the drawing:

Next time we'll be moving on to the inking stage! Stay tuned!