Was digging through some files yesterday and found some older sketches from when I began to draw again a year or so ago, thinking about doing a comic or some kind of creative project. I had a few ideas which I ultimately rejected. Here’s some of that material.

Bird Superhero Character - I had an idea for a bird that was a superhero - kind of a Clark Kent thing going on.

An interesting precursor to Asimov, maybe is this guy HENRI

When my eldest daughter was 4, we did a little project and wrote a children’s book together. I did some drawings of the little girl in the story thinking I would illustrate it. In reality, I want her to do it as a project though.

A more sophisticated version of Captain John?

Lastly, right before I realized I just didn’t have time to pursue animation, I was going to do a short based on this book “Trubloff” I read as a kid, a Russian folk tale about a mouse who plays the Balalaika. So I had done a bunch of drawings of him that I was going to use to build the model. Here’s one.

I kind of like these, I’m glad I’ve learned not to throw stuff away. I had done lots of stuff in college that is long gone now that I wish I still had. Never throw your art away!

I’ve been working on trying to get some better consistency with my characters. I’ve been drawing John over and over to try and get his proprotions right. Once I got it where I thought it should be, I added the other two characters and added reference points to make sure I’m drawing them in the right sizes in regard to each other. This isn’t the greatest scan but you can at least see what I came up with. I’ll probably make a nicer version from this that I can refer to while doing the strip, with a few other views of the other characters.

Here’s a little sneak peek of a character you’ll be seeing in an upcoming strip. Frightening eh?! He’s going to throw a little wrench into my continuity, which I am going to fix, but we’ll discuss that later.

And apparently I don’t have as many readers as I hoped - or ones that at least read my entry below my comic, because there aren’t that many entries for the Barnes and Noble $25 gift card in the strip comments for this week. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read what I wrote on this weeks strip.

Here’s the sketch:

I had the idea for this strip a year or so before I actually began to seriously work on it. At first, I was going to do it as kind of a sprite-based strip in Illustrator. As you can see the characters look nothing like they do now. Asimov (who was not yet named that) was a TV-type guy (although still wheeled) and John’s (Then called Ron) helmet completely covered his face. Kind of hard to make facial expressions that way.

The strip below was kind of a rough jab and seeing what it would look like. I did two of them and then shelved it for awhile. When I decided I wanted to look at it again, I knew I wanted to draw it traditionally and that the characters had to change.

(clickie to see full size)

Kind of interesting to see where the strip came from. I also did a more realistic drawing of a space captain character, but there’s no way I could pull off a comic in this style, it would take forever.

Took some time this morning before work to draw up some fan art for Tony Piro’s great strip Calamaties of Nature. I had always wanted to draw his characters and wanted to try a new coloring style. If you haven’t checked out Tony’s strip you really should, the characters are fun and his writing is funny. Plus, he just re-did his site and switched his format.