The Dark Knight

Experimenting a little bit here. I keep reading other artists' blogs where they talk about working from dark to light, so I thought I'd try it.

Yo, Lex!

This is my fourth shot at an established character (I seem to be on a roll lately). I originally planned to have Supes with his middle finger fully extended. Then I thought, "My friend Steve reads this blog..." and he loves Superman. But Steve's got a warped sense of humor, so he probably won't be offended. But then I thought, "My mom reads this blog..." and her favorite show when she was a kid was The Adventures of Superman starring Ben Affleck George Reeves and I didn't want to spoil her image of Superman as the consummate Boy Scout... Even though others have pointed out better than I ever could that Superman can be a real jerk. So, this is what we end up with. The gesture is a little less offensive, but hopefully the point comes across.

Captain Obvious

I watched Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog a few days ago. Unfortunately, by the time you read this they will have taken down all three Acts (but you can get it on DVD soon, if you're really interested). Anyway, it inspired me to continue my "superhero" theme a little bit. I named this guy "Captain Obvious," for reasons that may not be apparent.

Superhero

I used to dream about becoming a comic book artist when I was a kid. My heroes were people like Frank Miller, John Byrne, Wendy Pini and George Perez. I've mentioned before how I used to doodle in the margins of my schoolwork. Superheroes were frequently the subject of those drawings. I would create all kinds of mock battles between Spiderman and the Green Goblin, Batman and the Joker or Daredevil and Bullseye.

For this sketch, I wanted to work on a bit of figure drawing. Superheroes are great for that. After doing a couple of color drawings, I've gone back to doing something rough. This was done completely in Photoshop using a single graphite pencil brush. This sketch only vaguely resembles a certain "man of steel". I call him Generic Man.