I got to sit around and cut out paper dolls for a few hours today. This experiment came out better than previous ones – these cutouts cast a nice shadow in a few places, which usually isn’t the case when the pieces of paper are sandwiched in the scanner. I’m groping my way toward some kind of effect here …
This page from earlier in the year shows my attempts to get a fix on the design of the mysterious Darryl O’Doyle, a character in Smithson. Fortunately for me, the chief architect of O’Doyle’s look is Roger Langridge, who is very, very good at boiling a character down to his comic essentials. I was able to follow his lead for my rendition.
O’Doyle appears in two versions in Smithson, as a lively child prodigy and as a washed-up, distinctly non-talented-looking adult (who nevertheless seems to get a second act in life by means of automatic writing.)
A little bit of a image salad today …
Occasionally I break out my Kitchen Sink Press reprints of Will Eisner’s The Spirit comics and marvel at the artwork. I love the Spirit’s “superhero costume”: a baggy 1940’s suit, a tied-on mask, and gloves that don’t really look big enough to cover his huge mitts.
The ink studies below are from the 1949 story “Slow Boat to Shanghai”. Lookit all those crazy wrinkles. Of course, this is my cruddy copy; the original art is much more lively and solid. The character to the right is Bulkhead, a Popeye-esque thug that appeared in the story.
To the right is a study from the wonderful work of Drew Weing, who often works in a classic “bigfoot”-influenced cartoon style. Check out his main site and his beautifully drawn series Set to Sea.
And the bottom two characters are strictly my doodles. Ho hum.
I’m still finishing up my new art site, BrianMooreDraws.com. One of the things missing was a silly little caricature of myself, to go on the Contact page. It took a few tries (and some last-minute digital work on the head), but I think it came out pretty well.
Here are the first version, and the final version for the site (with digital background). The original paintings are watercolor on hot-pressed Arches paper.
