Super Lois in Color

I've been wanting to color my Super-Lois for quite a while. There's a bit of a challenge to coloring a piece like this, because I have this tendency to sketch to use a lot of lines to create form. I admit it, I like black and white, I like the way ink looks on the page. I like what can be done with black and white and nothing else. But I live in the real world, today. Maybe someday I will have the status where I can do whatever I want and get people to notice me, but today I need to do whatever it takes to get me noticed.

So it's a bit of a challenge to figure out how to get dynamic, dimensional color to interact well with graphic black lines, especially when I had all these rules about how color should never break up the graphic quality of black line art. So this is the piece where I really played around and decided to bend those rules a bit. It really opened me up.

I also cleaned up the art a lot. This drawing is actually a couple of years old and there are some "parts" of the anatomy that I have a bit of a passion for. Anyway, there are particular parts that are very important to me that they look "natural" and it's really important to me that form carries weight. So I cleaned up the drawing a bit as I colored it.

I don't draw like Kurt Schaffenberger, whom I love and whom inspired this piece, but I certainly tried to channel his "Good Girl" magic for this piece. I may not be there yet, but I'm pretty happy with this piece.

The Shadow Colorized

It's been a little while since my last post. I've been a bit wrapped up with other things, but there are some things I've been working on that I'll post in the next couple of days, mainly artwork that I've colorized, but I do have some new pieces coming as well.

Here I've added color to my latest "The Shadow" piece. Because ink is my media of choice, I've had some fundamental rules about applying color to my line art. I would probably have avoided color altogether but black and white doesn't shine on monitors as well as color does, and that is, after all, the way to get my work seen. As it turns out, my "rules" don't compliment the work as well as I would have liked so I've started deliberately breaking my rules, playing around with my Photoshop skills (to which I have a wide variety) to see what works and what doesn't work.

The reason for my rules (which I won't go into because I'm sure they're not interesting to anyone) are still on my mind, so even though I am breaking these rules, I am still thinking about the reasons I came up with them. And I think, what will happen, is that both my inks and my colors will move color to complimenting each other. Graphic black is still very important to me, but perhaps there is some give when adding color.