Comic Book Preparations - character study #9

Hello everybody!

_{Hi Doctor Nick!}

No, wait... Sorry! I can never see or hear that greeting without automatically thinking of the Simpsons... Does anyone else out there have a brain full of 90s tv quotes? There are worse afflictions, I suppose.

Anyway, in my last post I shared a drawing of a couple of my original characters, from a comic book I’ve been developing. I also mentioned that I’ve taken up working on my character studies again, and so I’m back to share the newest one with you all!

Back in the day, this lovely lady was originally known as “Gwyn”. But now that I’m reworking the whole comic, I decided she needed an update, and that name just wasn’t sitting right anymore. So after much research, and much “feeling it out” I finally decided on a new moniker… Thus we have Danica (or Dani to her friends).

As you can see, Dani is a fire elemental, and she belongs to the “neutral” group of elementals in the story. (There are also the “goodies” and the “baddies”, in case that needs clearing up…) She’s one of the main characters in the story, and so one that I am quite familiar with. And, while she was in need of some updating, I originally based her off of one of my childhood friends, so her fundamental bits have remained the same.

I decided to have some fun and draw a few varying expressions, to really get back into the swing of things. I do enjoy drawing exaggerated expressive faces… probably thanks in part to a slight obsession with anime in my teenage years. Lol

I sketched out the main image, and a couple of the expressive faces in one afternoon, but wasn’t totally satisfied, so came back the next day to add a couple more and fill things out a bit, before inking the outlines and coloring the full body drawing. This is how I’ve done most of my character studies so far, coloring one full body image, so it seemed only right to continue in the same way. I may need to revisit the first couple and make them the same as the rest, once I get through the whole lot. And, of course, I’ll be sure to share.

Here’s a look at the sketch, drawn with 3H wooden pencil, and HB mechanical pencil:

And the inked outline, lined with Micron pens:

A progress shot of the coloring (colored with Prismacolor pencils):

And the fully colored piece:

I still have a few more of these studies to do, plus, as I mentioned, I want to revisit a couple of the first studies to make them look like more of a part of the series. I’ve been working a bit on figuring out my storyline, did some storyboarding for the first couple pages, so hopefully I can keep myself on track for a little while, and have something to show before another couple years go by. Haha

See you soon!