THE RANDO'S CORNUCOPIA, pt.1!

Okay, "The Rando's Cornucopia" is a rather goofy name for a new Patreon feature, but (IMHO) it still beats calling this post "ODDS & ENDS, pt.1."

See, whilst cleaning out my studio to clear space for The Great Digital Switchover, I've dug up  veritable oodles and scads of random material from the halcyon days of yore, which I'll be posting here on occasion during an "open slot" day.

Some words of explanation:

A 1998 cover I drew for Andi Watson's Oni Press comic Geisha, featuring colors by Pat Duke, who also toned my pages for the original B&W version of Dirty Pair: Start the Violence. Pat did a great job on the piece, save for one color choice that bugs me to no end whenever colorists render my leather jackets: I need that sucker depicted with blue tones, not gray ones, dagnabbit!

And, yes, as the hashtag below mentions, this illo is protoreferenced from THAT leather jacket.

Afterward, Andi did a bit of an art trade for the Geisha cover, with this fun pic above of Kei & Yuri; can't remember if we ever repro'd the piece in the back of a DP comic.

Above is the 1997 announcement in Wizard magazine of the imminent release of my beloved one-shot Titans: Scissors, Paper, Stone. And yeahp, Titans started out as a 38-page DC Annual for the "Legends of the Dead Earth" event, later expanded to a 48-page one-shot after Editorial got a look at my way-too-tight layout pages for the story. So my goofy work method actually worked in my favor, for once!

Above is a scan of a newspaper ad clipping that served as photoreference for the outfit worn by Advanced Restraint Research's deceptive operative "Maura" in an Empowered vol.3 story, as seen below: 

Man, low-riding jeans were riding seriously low back then. Still a pretty good piece of photoref, though; I might try life-drawing from it at some point down the road.

Speaking of which, we close out the ol' Cornucopia with two pages of photoref-based life drawing done as gestural sketches prepping me for work on a 2016 Deadpool 10-page story:

My hope was to draw a leaner, less bulky physique for ol' Wade in this story, as opposed to the chunky sides o' beef I would often draw for male characters.

Alas that's not how things worked out, as under severe deadline pressure I wound up reverting to form and drew Deadpool as yet another hulked-out dude. My dissatisfaction with that depiction would, a few months later, be one of the factors that drove me to take up life drawing on a regular basis in the waning days of 2016.

And finally, an amusing li'l jpeg from that Deadpool story, noticed when I was combing through the project's folder: 

Anyhoo, hoped you liked this new feature, which I'll revisit from time to time in the months to come as every-weekday Patreon posting rolls on.