Art Progression

I put down my 2H pencil on page seven this morning, and finished my first extended fight scene for the comic. Page six gets the fighters in the ring. When I scripted it, I stayed vague about the details and intended to fill in the choreography and identities of the fighters as I went along. I figured out within the week who the robots would be and how they would be distinct in fight styles and that gave me the structure to set up a bout between two of them.

There's a UFC fighter named Anderson Silva who is the most successful fighter they've ever had. He's 13-0 since joining the UFC, and 11 of those wins are title defenses. He's tall, he's wiry, he's nicknamed "Spider." I wanted to copy that and came up with Wire Mother, the most feared fighter in the league. Here's her in-ring debut.

Here's the first sketch drawn tiny, followed by the larger sketch and the current pencils on the art board.

It's so, so much easier to draw on a larger scale. My wrist movements are larger, and the art flows easier from the pencils. Also, I may draw out my sound effects instead of typing them on the page scans.

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You might remember my hemming and hawing over a recent letter to the editor and my possible response to it. Oddly, there have been no response letters printed in the paper. Either everyone shrugged it off or the paper is saving the letters for a blowout reaction page. If it's the former, I'm glad I didn't jot off the only response letter; that would have been awkward the next time we ran into the original writer at the grocery store. If it's the latter, I would have been lost amid the probable wail of indignation.

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The sidekick has learned to bounce on his tush. This might replace the constant kicking. He still hasn't successfully assembled all the components of crawling. Not in the right order, not in the right amount.