Athena's Owl and Hydra, plus preview

...reduxed and finally completed after only, what, several months of sitting on the backburner.

Given that there are 13 more of these as sequential panels (see below), not to mention several more that were stand alone illos, it goes to show: Haste makes waste when you're trying to sprint a marathon with a full pack. 

That is to say, quality control suffers when more is added to your plate at any one time.

Also, being awake when you're drawing tends to help.

Nordic vs Hellenic

Slightly reworked color panel from the Viking Fraulein Onderzoek series some months back. More over at the Tumblr:

(Part 1)
(Part 2)
(Full color panel)

Nordic vs Hellenic

Part of a series of fight scene vignettes posted over at the Tumblr:
~ Part 1
~ Part 2

Beta Euthynus Proto Comic Roughs, cont'd

Some lighting and tone studies for what would either be rough comic panels or extremely clean storyboards. Give it another 5 years and these will be considered 1st pass thumbnails.

Memory Lane, plus random viking sketch

Some older commission design pages from around '08. The concept was supposed to center around a gift certificate or gift-card service with the idea of "Thank you" built into it. I'm not even sure if it's the correct kanji or Japanese term, but that's what I was given. I also think coffee was supposed to be part of the marketing factor, as in "Redeem at Starbucks" or whatever. These are some of the more interesting pages from the bunch.

Once past the initial stages of coming up with ad scenarios, I wanted to hone in on having a flagship character or set of characters that interacted with customers. In this case, a post-WWII delivery man and his pet shiba in tow. This was before I'd heard of Hachiko.

As always, once older material's dug up, the temptation's to correct now-obvious mistakes with the new drawing toys. Ended up redrawing ~40% of each page on the Cintiq. Which when considering the over/under for how crappy some older material can be, isn't all that bad. Mostly retooling of the faces - only took several years to unlearn self-taught bad habits - and some anatomy/shape refining.

Don't remember if this was earlier or later than the above two. In any case, the request was to go beyond the simple boy-and-dog duo. I think I was aiming more for a 50's flagship character that also served as a logo.

And, a random rough page from a recent series of Hellas-meets-Viking vignettes.

Athena's Owl - Vignettes

...And the greytone version. Had to jettison some of the metallic and floor highlights since those were done later on in color. Odd how depending on the colors chosen, the tone seems darker than the greytone study.

And one half of a character page from this past month.

WIP

Like I said, plenty more where the previous came from.

Athena's Owl - sketches

Several unfinished Cintiq studies of "Athena" and her owl. Several more besides these in the works, along with a grip of other illustrations that need tying down.

Beta Euthynus 3, plus sketches

Next installment. This suffered a few retakes, namely the girl's face and the gorgonopsid's general line of action in the chair. Redid the latter as a reverse S shape, which made it a little more pleasing to... well, my eye.

Some sketch pages from several months ago:

Literally the last page in the sketchbook.