It’s been a full year since I started my sabbatical, while much of it was spent grieving the loss of my parents and brother (not to mention the pandemic), I was able to devote myself to the task of improving my illustration skills. No small task I can assure you, it’s been more than 25 years since I was serious about it – and I wasn’t terribly good then!
This year has been the equivalent of a musician playing scales, doing my best to get some basic drawing and inking skills to a point where I can tackle sequential art. I thought I’d be further along, but that’s the thing about letting your skills lapse, there’s no telling how (or if) you’ll get them back.
This site has been the victim of neglect, posting this new art is a first step towards correcting that. All of the content needs to be reviewed and updated, and that’ll take about a week (the last time I updated the resume was 2017, weak sauce). Also, I’ll write a mini-manifesto for my next art project soon, so please subscribe to my site on the home page (joining the three others) to keep up-to-date.
These four galleries represent a ton of labor from the past year, and I hope you enjoy the work!
Large Format Drawings – I’ve spent 2019-2020 focused on improving my drawing and rendering skills, to varying degrees of success. I use my sketchbook to do day-to-day practice and explore ideas and layouts, but the big challenge is to do 11 x 17 drawings on bristol board. The earlier drawings are tentative, but I began to get a groove going these past few months.
Inktober 2019 – I noticed on Instagram the hashtag “#Inktober”, which turned out to be artists creating on inked piece per day. I was just beginning my year of retraining, and this offered some much needed rigor. I decided to explore the inking styles of the master comic book artists I have admired over the years, and this turned into a rich experience. Beyond learning who used what tools for what effects, I began to learn how rapidly (most) approached the task of embellishing. It was clear their mastery was not only of form and storytelling, but hitting deadlines!
Sketchbook 2019-2020 – I have a bad habit of abandoning sketchbooks, leaving many pages untouched. Another one of my goals for the year was to begin the habit of filling every page. Haven’t quite finished the 200 pages in this book, but it’s filled with a lot of ideas, practice and designs for future drawings. Also, I began poking around with digital coloring this year, using pages from the sketchbook as guinea pigs and some of those are included here.
Drawings, Sketches and Concepts – These drawings don’t fit into the other categories, so I needed to create a “kitchen sink” page to present them. The first 16 are from the past year, the others just randoms from the archive. This gallery contains a number of experiments I did in 2019 to get a sense of where my skills where. I tried some noir, some barbarian and some superhero styles to varying degrees of success. But I love them all for different reasons, mostly because I kept my pencils, pens and brushes moving while fighting the sense that I don’t have what it takes to be an illustrator.