As Sif I Had the Time

 Sif c. 1984

Scarlet red pencil and black India Ink on board.

17.15 cm  x  26.67 cm  (6.75 in.  x  10.50 in.)

Digital color over cleaned scan.

It’s no surprise that comic book conventions are about super-heroes, in America at least. When I do commission drawings sitting at a comic book convention (maybe at the Monster Enterprises booth or at a four-foot tablette on artist alley), I get to draw a lot of super-heroes. 

The demographic of folks who want to spend good money on a commission of their favorite characters tend NOT to be eight year-olds who REALLY love Ben 10. Rather they are older readers who want to celebrate their nostalgic fondness of characters from silver age (1960s) to 1990s. Luckily, I like that stuff too, so most of those commissions I can do from memory. 

Although my memory is not photographic, I do retain much from doing just one drawing of every new character or costume design. So this represents me practicing*, the first in a series I started this year with the following calculated benefits:

1. Practice drawing new characters and maybe new costumes.

2. Practice inking with ink and brush, sometimes as a warm up to inking a page for my comic book.

3. Use for those packs of comic book backing boards I bought**.

4. Practice using colored markers.

5. The marker colored (below) pieces I can sell at comic conventions. As an unknown artist, it helps to have a portfolio for folks to flip through, and sales-wise, having stock for “quick sale” is good.

6. Maybe stuff to post on monotonae.

7. After a couple of dozen, I can assemble and print them in sketch books, book which I can sell at conventions.

Scarlet red pencil, black India Ink and marker on board.

17.15 cm  x  26.67 cm  (6.75 in.  x  10.50 in.)

* This is what I did with with the Disney pantheon of characters up through the 1990s when I worked for Disney. I can still whether through a session of “stump the artist” when it comes to Disney characters.

** At my first comic convention, I discovered that colored pencils barely showed and marker based inks wouldn’t be taken fast to the coating on the face of the boards I had purchased, backing board commissions slipped into protective comic book bags was my whole plan for doing commissions. I was fortunate in that the reverse was not coated, and that was the side on which I drew. The subsequent re-stockings of backing board, actually resulted in a stock of a couple of packs with boards coated on both sides.