Recent Developments

This exists:

So life can start again! It's been a long time since I've drawn so I just went with some super-sketches. I was inspired by the 5-Minute Marvels blog but it's just me, so rather than the nice contrast between enthusiasm and skill mine come across as some abandoned middle ground.

First, unintentionally grayscale Batman (still workin out those Photoshop defaults)
That cape is freakin inconvenient, despite its inherent awesomosity. I hate using words like "warm-up" because they make me sound like I think I know what I'm doing but hey, peanut league teams warm up. So that's what this is. With bats, the challenge is usually drawing a male figure that's imposing and comic-y without being cartoonishly Goku-esque. Mostly: How to avoid tiny legs. In this case, avoid drawing them! But seriously, I think the side-shoulders work ok in this one and his ridiculously square jaw looks ok, if not great. Flattening out the whole face might be the way to get that to work for me. It's such a balancing act to try to get the key elements of the character from other people's art and fit them into the way I draw, especially when the way I draw seems to be "crappy."
THIS JUST IN: PERSON WHO POSTS DRAWINGS ON THE INTERNET HAS LOW OPINION OF OWN WORK. I will stop. From now on: relentless positivity!
So on to Wonder Woman. I'm not sure exactly what she's doing with the Lariat of Truth here, which seems to be more of a scarf. I tried to get a dynamic pose for WW to contrast with Batman's standard "standing" pose... I do like the feeling of action in this one though it's not really clear what's going on. Nothing, really. She's threatening somebody with a scarf.
Honestly, I feel like a scarf would be a much better tool for WW. She's always getting tied up with that unbreakable lasso.

Next for some crazy!
Tried to take a different approach on Ivy this time. Still thinking in terms of my Poison Ivy origin story that will take the world by STORM, I tell you, I was also thinking about something the writer of She Has No Head! on Comics Should Be Good said about Poison Ivy never wearing anything but plants. So I tried to figure out a way to make that less exploitative, more other, and came up with this trailing grass skirt idea, where everything is in various levels of drying out. Not a lot of attention given to how decent or indecent it might look because it's not arranged according to someone else's idea of sexy, and it probably serves some function--it's like her utility belt. I like sexy Ivy as much as anyone but especially the way I think of the character, there should be an undertone of danger to that-- not danger like "ooh, sexy danger" but danger to the social system. There's a reason Gotham has an asylum and not a jail. More on that later. But Batman villains should threaten cultural and social sanity. So she's just wearing some dead plants around her waist. That and a leaf corset, because my messages are CONSISTENT.

Hot dog I'm actually not too unhappy with this one! This Power Girl is the reason I started doing the Project: Rooftop sketches to begin with. I can't BELIEVE no one has linked her to the power symbol before. It fits so well. Now, this is nowhere near the same character as I think Power Girl currently is, so it's not a good fit for P:R. But can you think of a better use for x-ray vision than never having to stop reading the internet? I just like the idea that she hangs out a few hundred meters up, reading the comments on AVClub, while she waits for a distress call to come through. Her little surfin' glove is a little screwed up in the colored version but I think her hair ended up ok, actually.

Man. They're not perfect but it's nice to see how much more comfortable I was getting by the last one, and dang did it feel good to get the tablet out again.