(Smithson the webcomic begins here; I started drawing it at this page in the story.)

Another ink-and-gouache panel from a Smithson tryout story.

Here’s the full page that yesterday’s closeup is taken from, a tryout for a painted Smithson story. Ink and gouache on bristol. The lettering was done later, in Photoshop.

The plot concerns a dying gangster/sorcerer, so I tried to go for a kind of gothic woodblock print effect. Solid areas of color with large amounts of black. I didn’t plan out the artwork very thoroughly, so it was handy to have all that black to fall back on. It came out okay for an early attempt at gouache.

A close view of a painted Smithson panel, in gouache and ink. This was an early effort so the paint’s laid on more thickly than usual.

Here’s an early, slightly different pencil sketch for that painted cover image from a few posts back.

This was a wraparound cover idea for a theoretical Smithson book. You can see a detail of the painting in this post from last year. It’s gouache and ink on bristol board.

Here’s the version with logo and type:

The design is okay, but that logo needs some work. If I were to do this again I’d go for something more ragged-y and hand-drawn looking. (Or outsource it to somebody that knows what they’re doing.)

A colorful Smithson panel in gouache and ink. Looking at this new, vibrant scan, I’m startled to realize how terrible my old scanner was.

Here’s a gouache painting of Micki from Smithson. The spiral shape was a recurring visual motif; it showed up as a big sculpture in the middle of campus (which all the students sat on, naturally) and on a pachinko machine in one episode.

Someday I might make a post featuring all the appearances of another visual motif, a guy with big sideburns that I would put into the foreground of crowd scenes to establish depth. (I called him Ray Poussoir.)

Here’s another Smithson sketch from the archives. Here I had eventual print publication in mind, and was trying to arrive at a b&w style that I liked. And as always trying to draw faster and in a more lively way. I used colored pencil for the linework, with a loose watercolor wash and some gouache highlights. When I finished it I wasn’t that thrilled, but with a few years’ distance it looks okay.

Here I tried my hand at re-designing some Smithson characters, in gouache and ink. This is from a while back; now I’d go a little lighter with the gouache washes. Hey, that’s fun to say.