That's the first page of Pitt: In the Blood. Dale let me go and write, pencil and ink this baby all on my lonesome.

Apparently this issue and all of the Pitt Crew series are actually pretty hard to track down. I looked and couldn't find any copies in my collection and it seems that most online retailers only have a copy or two at best. I know it's anecdotal evidence at best, but that tells me that the books were under-ordered and probably more popular than understood despite the character being absent from publishing for all but three issues of Pitt/The Darkness last year.

By the way, I've started posting my artwork over at Comicartfans.com -- mostly the artist trading cards I've done, but also many of the pages I've been posting here recently. The link can also be found to the right in the box labelled "Personal Links". I've had a number of people ask for artwork and I've always been too disorganized to know what I had available and where to look for it, so this is a part of that whole getting organized I hear works for other folks!

~Richard

Jungle Girl Print for FanExpo

Decided to try and squeeze in a piece of artwork to make a print for this weekend's Fan Appreciation Event in Toronto:

Yesterday I did a bunch of thumbs after I developed an inkling of what I wanted to draw. I've been itching to do something Frazetta-inspired since his passing. I didn't want to just draw or redraw one of his classic pieces, so I focussed on the things that really said "Frazetta" to me. Despite his amazing male figures, it has always been his women and big cats that made the biggest impression on me. So, some sexy amazon astride a giant lion/tiger-type -- perhaps even a sabertooth in some dark jungle ruins is what my brain spat out after ruminating while chugging away on an elliptical machine in my gym.

I really like drawing parts of a piece at a size comfortable to draw that part at. Working on 14x17"bond, the above cat is about 12" wide. It's been a while since I drew something like this, so I pulled out my various How To - books to make sure I was getting the forms right. There was no way I was going to draw the jungle girl that size and get anything I could be happy with, so I merely placed in a scribbly manikin for gesture and position so I would have a good feel for how I'd position the girl.

The above drawing is around 14"tall -- so it's even larger than the cat above despite how small she's going to be in the final piece. Working this large allows me to draw with my arm instead of my wrist which, hopefully, allows the figure to look more fluid. The details that show large here, will largely disappear in the final, but the suggestion of the necklace and other ornamentation will work better if I can place it accurately on the form -- something that's easier to do at a larger size.

here's how they look merged together:

I have an image in my mind of how the rest of the composition works out, but that's something I'll actually do when I start painting in photoshop later today.

Scanning for Red!

I saw a new scanner the other day -- a nice 11x17" Mustek.

I've always wanted an 11x17" scanner, since using my 8.5x11" scanner is a pain to use when trying to input oversized art to my computer. Comics pages are 11x17", so you can see the immediate gratification to be had by swapping for one of this bigger puppies.

I almost made it an impulse buy; it's reasonably priced and the place is more than willing to ship to Canada, but, I really don't need an 11x17" scanner at this particular moment.

That doesn't stop me from still wanting it now!

So, instead of trying to justify the expense I thought I'd try to do something directly related to paying for this new scanner. I thought about just doing an open call for commissions, but there are some characters I'd rather not draw or are actually too much effort to add on top of my current workload. SO I decided to do this:

This is a sketch of another Red Sonja piece I was planning to do reasonably soon. I've decided to do an auction for the finished version of this drawing. It'll be completed on 11x17" 2-ply bristol board (see , I tied that plus-size scanner measurement into this!)

Here's the Ebay listing:

(Auction is over, so I deleted the link)

More details on payment and shipping and scheduling can be found at that link. If this works out, I'll make this weekly thing -- so feel free to make suggestions for other sketch-to-final art auctions.

And - -just for the heck of it, here's a quick funky colour version of the sketch: