I don't think I've posted these pages here before, though I could be mistaken. Anyhoo, behold the very first version of Empowered (long before the nascent project acquired that title), drawn over the weekend of July 4, 2004 in place of a bunch of damsel-in-distress pin-ups that were boring me to tears—and while I was waiting for editorial approval on a Marvel Livewires cover rough, but that's a subject for another post.
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2020-10-28 13:43:26 +0000 UTC
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Behold, s'more character-oriented design sketches from my 1995 miniseries Dirty Pair: Fatal But Not Serious. (Previous series post here.)
Kei butt cleavage ahoy! Not a fan of the rendering, though, which was just a bunch of fairly lazy and unimaginative high-contrast riffs drawn off th...
2020-10-27 13:00:04 +0000 UTC
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Once again, I'm doubling up with this week's set of life drawings from random photoref. (Someday I'll have to downgrade to a single piece per post, but my buffer of these pieces remains reasonably large.) First above is a set from April 2018, while the second set is an example from February 2017, still fairly early on in the effort.
Below, enjoy(?) the higher-res, raw and untweaked grayscale scans as PSD attachments.
TUESDAY ON THIS HERE PATREON:
2020-10-26 13:16:00 +0000 UTC
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Text!
UPDATE: Whoops, forgot this scheduled post had only placeholder text tacked on it; didn't get around to editing this sucker before it posted!
Anyhoo, a few quick words, hastily and belatedly added:
A 2018 piece from Heroes Con in Charlotte; important, because I've used high-contrast visual riffs along these lines ever since.
2020-10-23 13:01:09 +0000 UTC
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Behold, a trio of Clip Studio Paint sketch sets based on suggestions from the $10 & $20 Patron tiers, which are the only art reqs I can take on at present as the Empowered vol.12 restart ramps up—or, really, the restart of the restart, which was put on hold due to real-world issues I had to deal with.
NOTE TO THE $10 & $20 TIERS' BIG SPENDERS: Your tier(s)-exclusive monthly post will be coming up sometime during the next week...
2020-10-22 13:34:13 +0000 UTC
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Behold, two new-to-y'all (if not actually new) DiD-related pieces! A few words about 'em:
A commission in my two-color—nay, three-color!—con sketch format featuring Empowered distressed by "Leather-Loving Laetitia," a goofy, leather-obsessed villainess who appeared many Wednesdays ago in a scene from a Y**i DiD story (which I don't feel like combing back through my sprawli...
2020-10-21 13:01:02 +0000 UTC
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Behold, s'more hardware-oriented design sketches from issue #2 of my 1995 miniseries Dirty Pair: Fatal But Not Serious. (Previous series post here.)
A few words:
The character above is not, in fact, unnamed, as I later decided her name was Ng Mui, after the notably more heroic...
2020-10-20 13:01:01 +0000 UTC
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Once again, I'm doubling up with this week's set of life drawings from random photoref. (Someday I'll have to downgrade to a single piece per post, but my buffer of these pieces remains reasonably large.) First above is a set from April 2018, while the second set is an example from February 2017, still fairly early on in the effort.
Below, enjoy(?) the higher-res, raw and untweaked grayscale scans as PSD attachments.
2020-10-19 13:00:04 +0000 UTC
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I'm a-clearin' out the pieces in my old CON SKETCHES folder alphabetically, so here's a grab-bag of Dirty Pair commissions lurking in the (ahem) D section, produced over a wide range of years.
A few words:
An inked 2003 piece based off an Adam Hughes Wonder Woman cover, as a study in emulating his inking approach—and also emulating his broad-shouldered ap...
2020-10-16 13:02:09 +0000 UTC
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In a post that's taken me a g-d hour to put up (thanks to g-d Firefox seemingly being unable to complete image posting on g-d Patreon), here are the complete work stages on a trading-card illustration of Marvel's character Valkyrie, drawn in 2006 for Upper Deck.
Posted the work stages in reverse order because, well, why not?
Line art by me, final colors by the fine lads of Guru eFX, who also colored Dirty Pair: Sim Hell Remastered, Gen13, Empo...
2020-10-15 13:01:01 +0000 UTC
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Behold, an early to mid-2000s story fragment pitting Y**i from Dirty Pair—now "Lily" in these highly noncanonical DP Distressverse stories, to avoid triggering a Patreon autoflag—against Cammy from Street Fighter. Now, real Y**i would give Cammy a run for her money as a martial artist, but this is hapless, damselification-skewed Lily, who might well be just as bondage-cursed as Empo...
2020-10-14 14:59:33 +0000 UTC
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Behold, some hardware-oriented design sketches from issue #2 of my 1995 miniseries Dirty Pair: Fatal But Not Serious.
A few words:
Blah blah blah
UPDATE: Whoops, forgot to add "a few words" before this pre-scheduled sucker posted!
Alas, the "...
2020-10-13 13:01:01 +0000 UTC
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Once again, I'm doubling up with this week's set of life drawings from random photoref. (Someday I'll have to downgrade to a single piece per post, but my buffer of these pieces remains reasonably large.) First above is a set from April 2018—despite the "3.14.2018" mislabeling—while the second set is an example from February 2017, still fairly early on in the effort.
Below, enjoy(?) the higher-res, raw and untweaked grayscale scans as PSD attachments.
2020-10-12 13:00:04 +0000 UTC
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Whilst digging through old photocopies of con sketches, unearthed a bunch of older Dirty Pair pieces featuring a wide range of varying takes:
*Kei & Y**i reclining on an iteration of Mughi never seen in the comic—but then again, Big Fluffy Anime Mughi is far and away Best Mughi, IMHO. Note also the rare appearance of Y**i in a thong, which is a form of underwear I rarely if ever draw, for reasons I'll likely explain here someday down the road.
2020-10-09 13:00:03 +0000 UTC
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Behold, an initial bunch of sketches based—however loosely—on October art requests from the $20 Patron tier!
A few words:
As the date might hint, this is an older con sketch done for a current Patron a few years ago. I'm posting it here because the scenario depicted is somewhat akin to a suggestion from October's art-req posts. This sketch isn't necessarily canonical, especia...
2020-10-08 13:58:17 +0000 UTC
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Recently received an email with a scan of an old-ish commissioned piece from ehh, 1998-99 or so, judging by Y**i's nasal structure. (Name censored b/c it triggers an autoflagged message from Patreon; perhaps I could just call her "Lily," which is supposedly the meaning of her Japanese name. Come to think of it, "Lily and Red" could be pseudonyms for the commissioned bondageverse Dirty Pair, I suppose.)
'Twas a follow-up of sorts to earlier commissioned il...
2020-10-07 13:01:01 +0000 UTC
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Behold, some design sketches for issue #1 of my 1995 miniseries Dirty Pair: Fatal But Not Serious. (For the record, the title comes from a line in a P.J. O'Rourke piece, which went something like this: "What ails Poland is, as the Poles say, fatal but not serious.")
The opening issue was split between scenes of a 2141 talk show discussing the DP's cultural impact and a hardware-intensive action scene; alas, I seem to have more designs from the former sequence t...
2020-10-06 13:01:00 +0000 UTC
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Once again, I'm doubling up with this week's set of life drawings from random photoref. (Someday I'll have to downgrade to a single piece per post, but my buffer of these pieces remains reasonably large.) First above is a set from April 2018, while the second set is an example from February 2017, still fairly early on in the effort.
Below, enjoy(?) the higher-res, raw and untweaked grayscale scans as PSD attachments.
2020-10-05 13:01:01 +0000 UTC
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Behold, a few Vintage Con Sketches that were colored by my bud Ryan Kinnaird just for the hell of it! I shall now endeavor to dig up the B&W originals for these pieces (or photocopies thereof, more accurately) before this post goes up Friday morning after next, but can't guarantee that I'll find 'em in time; oh, the tension!
UPDATE: Found one of 'em, at least!
2002's Ice Mage Ziggy is (IIRC) one of the De...
2020-10-02 13:01:01 +0000 UTC
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Time for a super-super technical post on comics storytelling posts, dear Patrons, even if I'm unsure as to how many of you will particularly appreciate the blithering that follows.
So!
Strictly from an artist's POV, I quite dislike grid-based comic-page layouts such as the famous Watchmen 9-panel grid, as I find such arrangements annoyingly static and restrictive, often denying me the space I want and need for compelling and dynamic in-panel compositions....
2020-10-01 13:00:31 +0000 UTC
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I recently unearthed a few 1998-era damsel-in-distress commissions featuring Jamadagni—aka "Witchy-Poo"—from my '97 one-shot Titans: Scissors, Paper, Stone. As she is supposed to be a witch of sorts, the commissioner wanted her depicted in various pseudo-historical witch-related scenarios.
One such situation featured our heroine about to burnt at the stake in some vaguely medieval setting:
2020-09-30 13:01:03 +0000 UTC
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Behold, a rare few design sketches for the first two issues of my 1992 miniseries Dirty Pair: SimHell (which was how the title was supposed to read, a la SimCity, but I never clarified that matter). I know that more of these are a-lurking somewhere in my thousands of files, but I've yet to find any more; if I do, I'll surely post 'em here down the road.
Most of the hardware didn't actually get used in the published miniseries,...
2020-09-29 13:40:37 +0000 UTC
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Once again, I'm doubling up with this week's set of life drawings from random photoref. (Someday I'll have to downgrade to a single piece per post, but my buffer of these pieces remains reasonably large.) First above is a set from April 2018, while the second set is an example from February 2017, still fairly early on in the effort.
Below, enjoy(?) the higher-res, raw and untweaked grayscale scans as PSD attachments.
2020-09-28 13:01:02 +0000 UTC
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Behold, a few Vintage Con Sketches that were colored by my bud Ryan Kinnaird just for the hell of it! I shall now endeavor to dig up the B&W originals for these pieces (or photocopies thereof, more accurately) before this post goes up Friday morning, but can't guarantee that I'll find 'em in time; oh, the tension!
UPDATE: Found 'em!
Keiko and Seiko are characters from Kabuki: Scarab, the min...
2020-09-25 13:00:07 +0000 UTC
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Behold, an incomplete version (scanned from a recently unearthed photocopy) of a 1994 page I did for, I think, Kenichi Sonoda's Chosen Ame doujinshi. Rare toplessness ahoy, folks! A friend of mine was a regular contributor to the doujin, so I submitted a few pieces over the years.
The "incomplete" bit is due to the fact that those asterisks tagged after the SAS dudes' dialogue presumably referred to notes clarifying that nope, that's not a SAS uniform at all, and nope,...
2020-09-24 13:01:01 +0000 UTC
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Aaaand here are a final pair of (TBH) not tremendously inspired Clip Studio Paint damsel-in-distress sketch sets for September, based on art reqs from the $10 & $20 Patron tiers.
Gotta say, random DiD reqs can get hacky in a hurry for me; after all, Empowered came to exist because I was bored outta my gourd with just drawing damsel-y pin-ups. Down the road, I might ask Patrons making DiD suggestions to gimme a non-DiD back-up option to possibly sketch...
2020-09-23 13:00:06 +0000 UTC
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Very, very rare to find any design sketches from my first three Dirty Pair miniseries, but I have managed to dig up three pages of 'em from 1990/199's Plague of Angels recently whilst cleaning out my studio space. A few words:
Ladies and gentlemen, that gun design is clearly based on the 2020-09-22 13:00:05 +0000 UTC
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Once again, I'm doubling up with this week's set of life drawings from random photoref. (Someday I'll have to downgrade to a single piece per post, but my buffer of these pieces remains reasonably large.) First above is a set from April 2018, while the second set is an example from February 2017, still fairly early on in the effort.
Below, enjoy(?) the higher-res, raw and untweaked grayscale scans as PSD attachments.
2020-09-21 13:01:01 +0000 UTC
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Working my way through my CON SKETCH folder on the ol' hard drive, found a pair of illos of Marvel's Daredevil and Elektra! The most recent, two-color piece was drawn at Emerald City Comic-Con four or so years ago, and was clearly based on the then-recent Netflix Daredevil show:
Note that, as usual for modern superhero fare, the TV version of ol' Hornhead's costume is maddeningly complicated, r...
2020-09-18 13:01:01 +0000 UTC
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Due to increasing worktime constraints, I can only take art requests from the two highest Patron tiers, and even those are being crowded out by the burgeoning demands of Empowered vol.12.
Anyhoo, above are a trio of Clip Studio Paint sketch sets based on Patron suggestions, which are fairly self-explanatory, I think. (Note for the $20 tier: The remaining DiD pics will be posted on Wednesday the 23rd, or on the 30th at the latest.)
TOM...
2020-09-17 15:16:51 +0000 UTC
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