The Dark Knight returns to my blog

This came out a little thicker and heavier than I like Batman to be, though a far cry from the bulky bodybuilder version I've seen recently. And I do love this classic costume. He doesn't seem to have a waist though, the ribcage is jammed right down against the pelvis. I hate when that happens.

Looks pretty good with some color on it. 

This is my attempt at the slender Batman. I imagined him somehow having a quiver on his back and pulling an arrow from it or something. Lol, didn't make sense when I drew the cape on. So maybe he's scratching his head. Hey, bats can get fleas.

These were copied from something—probably by Jim Aparo.

For the top one the idea was he's high on the wall of some warehouse over a river, letting himself fall back gracefully, doing a tuck-and-roll, and then emerging in a perfect dive. I really liked the much more graceful and acrobatic heroes of the 70's—Daredevil was another example.

Every once in a while, even during my Summer of Superheroes, I still just did generic figures in action poses. But I was definitely thinking superheroes.

This one was undoubtedly conceived as a Batman pose. 

This drawing is from one of my 90's sketchbooks. Man, I was really drawing powerfully and intuitively then!! This is one of my favorites from that period. So I decided to color it in...

I think if I kept working it I could turn this into something really good, it would just take some work. But I lost interest when the energy of the original sketch got lost. Now it's midway between that rough sketch and a more fully developed painting.

Actually, scrolling up and down this page, this piece jumps out from the rest, probably because of the unusual darkness and coloring, plus the fact that we're viewing him from the shadow side rather than the lit side. All very eye-catching.

Begin Batman

Feeling like I can draw Thor fairly well now on my own, without copying anybody. So I started doing some poses—still playing around with different proportioning etc.

I notice on the big guys I have a tendency to make the chest look flattened out. Also something weird about the way his left arm is attached to the torso—that's another problem of mine, no matter how big a character is. Never mind the expressionless face, that's still the way I'm drawing heads, like they're on mannequins. Soon I'll start giving them expressions and turning/tilting the heads for more life.

Here I really wanted to draw him big!! Almost like the Hulk—in fact my informal name for this version is HulkThor.

Liked it enough to start putting some color to it, even though it isn't a finished drawing. Partly I want to see how much I can still work on the drawing itself digitally, clean it up and add parts I left off, make any necessary changes.

Added a face entirely digitally. Looks pretty decent I think, like it's part of the original drawing.

The hair was the hardest part to add, because I needed to make the strokes bold enough to not wobble (much), but they needed to end up hitting exactly the right places. Had to try most lines over and over many times.

... And suddenly I felt I had drawn enough Thor and wanted to do a completely different body type. Actually first I just drew yet another practice head, then a second one that on impulse I put the Bat-cowl on. Then I grabbed an old comic from the 70's and copied a drawing by Jim Aparo, one of my favorite Batman artists.

Long, lean and athletic, that's the Batman of the 70's. He was also a dark creature of the night, more so than in any earlier incarnation, and largely to combat the damage done by the ridiculous 60's TV show that presented him as a silly buffoon.

Sometimes Aparo would switch to a much thinner version of Batman that emphasized grace rather than power. I didn't draw any of those here. Just wanted to mention it.

Thormania!

Copied from the legendary Jack Kirby, king of all comic book artists. His Thor looks boyish here, almost feminine. I didn't draw Loki's upper arms because he was being carried buy 2 guys, their arms were blocking the shot.

I love to do these dark, scribbly drawings crackling with energy. I think it looks really cool, but there are definitely problems with it that will become apparent as I put some color to it.

He's just sort of holding Mjolnir up in front of himself and looking at it. Is he shaking it at somebody while telling them off? And his hair looks weird.

Hair and hammer looking better, but now he's not looking at whomever he's threatening.

Ok, the gesture is much more focused now, but you can't see his face anymore! He's looking away from the viewer. That would work in a comic book panel, especially if you can see his opponent past him. But it doesn't work so well for a painting of just Thor himself. I lost interest on realizing this, and also I had put a lot of time and effort into it and it was just getting worse as I went. In most regards I like the earliest version best, though the colors there were looking pretty pastel and have gotten much better here. Still though, I really like the idea of coloring my pencil drawings. It works especially well with superheroes I think. But note to self—make the drawing look better before you try it.

It looks to me like a comic book artist turned to the guy next to him and said "Hey man, I need a reference pic—can you lay down on the floor and let me get some pictures? And make sure to make Kirby hand.

I bought some laser printer paper for the slick surface, but found it was hard to draw on. It's too slick—lines come out super light until you press really hard, and you can't draw like that. I really like the head though.

The issue I copied this one from is the only time I've ever seen Thor wearing pointy-toed boots...

I copied this one badly at first, realized I wasn't paying attention to the shapes of the body and the stance, which was supposed to look heroic and powerful. So I redid it, using construction this time and paying a lot more attention. Still not great, but it looks much better.

Enter Thor and my Summer of Superheroes

I sat down one day in July of last year and started to do random figure drawings, as I had been doing all along, when for some reason I wanted to draw Thor spinning his hammer. I think I was just looking for some kind of action and that's what came to mind. It stuck, and this launched me into drawing superheroes for the next few months. It makes sense—I'm trying to learn the human figure and anatomy, so it's necessary to draw muscular people. The big Thor on the right is the one I drew first, entirely from my own head. Later I grabbed a comic book and copied him from the cover there on the left, but afterwards I strengthened the spin-lines of the hammer which almost obliterated the background Thor.

Playing around with comic-style shading techniques on the head, and trying a different hammer-spinning pose. Not a very good one!

What brought on all this sudden superhero silliness? I don't know.

When I drew the first Thor, I thought it looked pretty much like the way Walt Simonson used to draw him. But I looked at the comics and wow, was I wrong! This is a copy of a Thorface he did.

Another one, and a Tharm (?) Both copied from Simonson.

Soldier dude, drawn with scribbles.

I really like Simonson's style. It's hard to do, even copying.

I decided to try a couple on my own, concentrating on proportions, because I was having trouble getting that big superhero look right. I wasn't trying to make them look like Simonson's Thor, just trying to figure out how to draw a character so bulky through the chest and shoulders. Kind of weird-looking above, especially that pose! Is he falling over backwards?

I like the Thor-portioning here. Legs maybe a little short. I chuckled as I drew the exaggerated Kirby feet. He's looking pretty mighty though.

This one had ridiculously short lower legs, so I stretched them out in photoshop. Weird looking, but there's something about it I like.

... Enough that I turned it into what I can only call ColorForms Thor. This one began a tradition of coloring my pencil drawings while preserving the line work, comic book style. I really like the colors here, as bland as the non-pose is. But I realized, if you want to concentrate on proportions, don't do crazy poses. Just standing there is best. Look how small his head is! Of course that's what makes the big guys look so big.

Getting a-Head of the curve

Ah, who was I kidding? I couldn't wait a whole week. I kinda knew it really, even as I lied to myself that I would.

Shifted my focus to heads for this next batch. I had been drawing some simple wig-head looking things before this with like blocky noses etc, but now I wanted to try to bring them to more of a finish. More fully developed features and better shading using the core shadow technique. Also using what I've learned about edges, in particular the fact that form shadows have soft edges, while cast shadows have much harder edges. Seemed really weird when I first learned it—I didn't believe it was true, but I looked at shadows on myself, things around me, and in photographs, and after a while I had to admit it is. I like this one on the right, but once I noticed the eyes aren't in line with each other I could never unsee it again. Quasimodo's sister?

Going much more masculine here, almost Hulk-like. I wanted to try to develop a few different types.

Earnest and concerned guys. Wow, look at that—I even tried to have the one on the right looking down, with his neck bent. That's a first I think.

I like the smiling dude on the left—looks a lot less wimpy than the ones above. Then another attempt at neck mobility, not very successful. I can see that's something I need to learn about. I do applaud myself for a good effort though, and the face looks pretty good. Those upshots are difficult!

This time I decided no way would I let the eyes go out of alignment! I started by drawing a line across right through the center of each eye (erased by this point), and I paid very careful attention to make each eye match the other one. I also took it into Photoshop and sweetened the shading up a bit. That's always an issue with a pencil drawing done on toothy paper though—you can really see the graininess of the pencil shading compared to the digital smoothness of the Photoshop shading. Still though, looking really good.

Added some hair, stolen from a Miranda Sings picture. It's weird how much that changes the picture, it hardly even looks like the previous one anymore. I specifically wanted black hair because it's so much easier to draw than blonde or anything light—mostly just a solid black mass with some highlights here and there. Hair is something I really need to get a lot better at.

I noticed after adding the hair the drawing itself lost something and it took me a while to figure out why. Finally it hit me—if you look at the original version above, the quality of the line is very important. It gets thicker and thinner in places, very 'tailored'. But once I added black hair most of the way around, right up against the outline of the head, that outline disappeared. Now it's just an edge of light against dark. The tailored qualities, the thicker and thinner play—just gone. This does look good in a different way though. It just takes some getting used to. But that is the difference—one of them anyway—between simpler comic-book style line drawing and more realistic greyscale drawing in a painterly style.

And I realize the equivalent to that tailored line in a greyscale piece like this is edge. If I had taken the time to develop this farther I would work the edges just as much as I originally worked the thickness of the outline—in fact I did develop it a bit more below. The interplay between hard, firm, soft and lost edges is where much of the magic is in this kind of work—I'm really coming to understand that. It can impart just as much life as a tailored line, possibly more.

Developed it farther, smoothed things out all over. I considered really going to town on the hair, but I knew if I started that it would turn into a week-long project, and I was doing sketches supposed to only take a couple hours at most. I don't remember how long I worked on it, might have been a day or 2.

Back from hiatus—posting my work from 2019

I decided at the beginning of 2019 to stop posting my work immediately after drawing it. There's something about it being seen too soon after finishing that I don't like. I never intended to wait a full year to post these, but somehow that's what happened. I must say though, it really did feel freeing to be drawing only for myself again.

After they've sat for a while—a few months maybe—it no longer feels like putting your freshest work up for inspection, you've drawn a bunch more stuff since then and that's what still feels too fresh to show. This is now older stuff.

In 2018 I decided I needed to work mostly on my drawing, especially figures, before getting back to the painting. The issues I was having were drawing issues. So I kept drawing.

I work best in pencil on regular old paper. It used to be typing paper back in the 70's and 80's, now that's hard to find and instead we have copier paper, which is much thicker and toothier. I do sort of miss the slick surface of the bond paper, but I also like the thicker feel of today's copier paper. And it comes in 11 x 14, a size I really love to work on, though most of my practice sketching is done on good old 8.5 x 11, standard typing bond size.

I don't know why it took me until July to start drawing last year. I guess I had other stuff going on. And I didn't get a lot done, for the most part just a few drawings a week, but I did keep on going that way for most of the remainder of the year. I'll start posting, probably once a week, in batches like this.

At this point I was just trying to get the feel for drawing figures entirely from imagination again. What I was trying to do is get a dynamic pose down first, a good gesture, and then develop it into a full figure drawing.  Sometimes I'd start with the stick figures like you see up at the top and draw cylinders and blocks around them to manikinize them into figures. Sometimes I skipped the stick men. Just playing around.

Sometimes I thought about the Vilppu method. This is not really a good representation of it. I shouldn't have smirched his name by writing it here, but I wanted to remind myself that's what I was thinking about when I did these. I always try to write little reminders to myself or I won't remember anything about how I did them.

This is gonna be fun! All of these were photographed on the same day, though drawn over a period of a week or so.

See ya next week!

Patchwork man

I Frankenstein'ed this one up a bit - fixed some of the proportioning issues but introduced some new ones. I realized the mistake I had made (the main one) -- when I drew the head and arm I proportioned them to fit the massive chest, when they should have fit with the waist and pelvis. So I ended up with everything looking normally proportioned but a small waist and pelvis, when just the chest was supposed to be extra big. It's better now, but now the chest is too wide. Think I'll stop messing with weird superhero proportioning for a while. Or not - we'll see.