Weekly sketches!

Another week where I am just showing old sketches, but some of my old sketches are kind of fucking FIIIIIRE hahaha. And I forgot about some of these! So it was really cool to see them! ☺️☺️☺️

1. This was kind of just me fucking around with paneling one day; I think the final product ended up giving slightly rapey vibes, and so I never did anything with it, but in general I really like the layout and the heavy use of black!

2. The drawing of Anaïs here isn’t amazing, as it is kind of wonky, but it was the type of thing where I liked it a lot but I wasn’t able to figure out what to do with it. Alas!

3. The schoolgirl sketch is cute; I was trying my hand at drawing someone younger (we all know how hard it is to draw kids) - obviously that was unfinished! The Anaïs was something I drew to give my roommate Marcos an example of how they could draw Anaïs’ outfit in their own comics more simply than my labor-intensive method. Honestly… I kind of really love how that looks. My friend Glen Murakami always talks about simplifying in terms of shapes and texture, and I think this might be one of my own better examples of that.

4. I completely forgot about this; this was actually the first sketch I did for what would become ALL EYES ON ME, when it was still about a silent film actress in the 1920’s. She was to be presenting the octopus to her friends as her wife, and they were all going to freak the fuck out before the octopus hypnotized them and robbed them of their voices. It’s a very different idea than what it became, but I still think it’s pretty cool!

5. Drawings of the woman who was to be the main character in ALL EYES ON ME, based on silent film star Louise Brooks. Crepax used Brooks as his model for Valentina, and so I wanted to do something similar here, as a kind of nod to both things. Obviously I didn’t end up doing that lmao.

6. Some leather asses from reference. The shape of a big, juicy ass can be kind of hard to get right, so reference is always nice. But also, the way leather shines on an ass — it’s harder to get right than you might think! I don’t actually tend to get it right, because leather is softer than vinyl and latex, and therefore its reflectivity is substantially more coarse. But like, it’s always worth trying to learn!

7. Some faces - a design for a male character I was going to use for…something? Most of my male characters are modeled after what I used to look like as a boy, and this drawing is no exception hahaha. I was also trying to draw a building facade from reference; you never really recognize the intricacies of design on a building until you have to draw it, and then you want to cry lmao.

8. Wanted to draw a lesbian couple - maybe like a gym couple? - but I was never able to get the drawing right. I am not the best when it comes to size relations between characters and each other, and characters and their surroundings. So here… the drawing is fucked! But I liked the idea of the pose hahaha.

9. I really like that cowboy on the upper right-hand corner. In the past, I used to draw eyes TOO big, and only after looking at some of those Sergio Toppi drawings did I realize the fault in my methods. It’s not that I need everything I draw to be super realistic, but I think I had a tendency of making eyes WAY wider than they ever would be; nowadays, I feel like I do something kind of between the two methods: I definitely draw them larger than this, but I don’t draw them as big as I used to (unless it is stylistically appropriate).

Hope y’all find these worthwhile! Was there anything here that felt of particular interest to you? Was there a page that maybe felt inspiring? Or maybe there were drawings here that surprised you stylistically! I would love to hear any of your thoughts! ☺️☺️☺️