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.