Sketchbook - New Mutants

When I got down here to Mexico and set up the new studio it really was a kind of hard reset. My hours stayed roughly the same but everything else got overhauled... I built a new drawing table (no, really!) and I was in an actual artist's space, rather than an working form the same apartment where I lived.
I saw this as an opportunity to re-approach the work from fresh angles as well, and as part of that I was working my way back through the incomparable Dynamic Anatomy, Burne Hogarth's perennial anatomy & figure drawing super vitamin. I'd put in an hour or so of figure scribbling then get to work proper. On off days I'd skip the lessons and just draw, something fun, something just for me, to keep that love of drawing still engaged.

I'd done also done a really deep dive on Bill Sienkiewicz lately, the repub of his groundbreaking run on New Mutants sent me back to the well. I'll make a longer post about Bill S. later, but I was a New Mutants fan, more so than the X-men and his run on the book was my initiation to the group. Seeing the old costumes gave me a hankering to give 'em a draw, so in between anatomy lessons I would revisit the old crew.

I've been fooling around with copics, I'm not a convert yet, but I'm interested in seeing what a grayscale (b&w) base with a watercolor (color) wash over would yield, so these were unofficial experiments with copic b&w work. (ed. note: the alcohol in copics kills any paper you might want to then retouch with watercolor - the reverse, laying down a color paint base and then blocking in with copics over is slightly more effective. Back to the drawing board)

Karma & Magik came out of that, I really like the look of a finished black and white, it's somehow neater, I should really do more. Magma & Firestar are really B-sides, I wasn't totally happy with how Amara turned out and Firestar was entirely wanting to work in a full Art Adams mode, which is such a fun way to draw but sadly fits less and less with the comic I'm working on...