Sometimes I create
way more work for myself than I should. I did this with two commissions I'm working on for a couple of people.
The first is a DC Comics commission, of which approximately 25 characters were requested that I draw. I decided to use a 23"x29" piece of plate-finish bristol board to work on. When I started drawing all the characters, I decided to put more and more characters in, until I literally ended up with 100 characters jumping and flying around. To add more crazy to the mix, I ended up drawing the city of Metropolis down below, just so I could fit in The Daily Planet globe!
I'm currently just about halfway through inking this piece. The above picture of the Batman figure is of the beginning of the inking process. I've since redrawn Superman several times, along with the Shazam! family. The Spectre (top center) is going to be a very huge challenge, as I'm going to attempt a gray-toned cross-hatching effect that will hopefully blend into the starry sky. We'll see how that turns out.
This was how I worked out the composition. I did 3 rough designs on an 8.5"x11" piece of paper, and my client picked the one he liked best, which I went with.
The second commission I'm working on is a Captain America piece, commemorating the various big events in Captain America's timeline. This is another piece where I could have just drawn Captain America with a bunch of other Marvel heroes & villains he's interacted with, but I had this idea of doing panel frames. This idea had me ending up placing about 80 characters into the commission piece, where about 20 would have sufficed.
This piece is 17"x29", this time on 3-ply plate-finish bristol paper. I actually worked the preliminary piece full size, instead of on small thumbnails, like with the DC piece. You see in the above picture I took a while ago that I've started inking this already. I'm about halfway through inking this, even though I started the DC piece much sooner. I basically go back and forth from the DC to the Marvel piece, working on a figure here, several figures there.
Working on these large boards is a logistical pain in the butt, as I'm 5'6" tall. My reach isn't the longest, being a short guy. I'm wrestling with the big size paper, while always avoiding creasing the paper by leaning into it against the edge of the table. It slows everything down significantly.
I'll post updates of these pieces when I can. When these are all finished, I plan on spending the ridiculous amount of money to get full-sized scans of these pieces. Until then, everything's going to be presented to you with digital pictures.
