And… here are the finished inks to the last story in my upcoming Anthology “The Turning & Other Stories”, collecting my short stories from Mythography and The Forbidden Book among a few unpublished stories from the same era.

The Ottawa Comic Con was a few weeks ago now. Here’s the drawings I did specifically to bring to the show as well as the ones done at the show!

It’s been years since I’ve done a commission at a show (the not doing shows for a good 9 years is probably the biggest culprit) and I was a little terrified drawing to order. But I think they all came out nicely.

I’ve posted these elsewhere but thought it would be nice to have them all in one place!

I started this “Story” a ridiculously long time ago.

It was initially started for Mythography #3 as a 3 page story/vignette.  Editor Michael Cohen had a 3 page opening, but after penciling and partially inking 2 pages I soon realized the “story” wasn’t going to fit in the allotted 3 pages so I scrapped it and sent in 3 pin-ups instead.

A couple years later I pulled out the 2 unfinished pages and light tabled them to new paper so I could start fresh but again dropped it when I realized I didn’t have the layouts for the original third page.

During my hunt for old short stories and pin-ups I ran across the story again and thought it would be fun to finally finish it, given that I’m putting together a collection of my short stories from those years. I also found the layout/rough pencils to the original third page this time around.

So, I imported the story into Clip Studio, cut the layouts to page 3 up to expand it to 4 pages to get the story to fit, and started re-pencilling everything digitally.

I’m probably going to tighten up a few details before starting to ink, but this is usually as far as I go with pencils.

I’ll post the final inks once they are done!

I’ve never put together a dedicated inking portfolio.

Given that I started my comic career as an inker, and the majority of my work-for-hire comic book work has been as an inker, that might seem odd.

The truth is I never really pursued inking work. It was just offered to me when I showed my portfolio of fully inked art.

I’ve done my share of test and tryout pages at an editors request, but I’ve never attempted inking other artists work as an exercise or as portfolio pieces with the purpose of showing to land inking work.

I’ve been toying with changing that.

I got my hands on some scans of Nick Derington’s Doom Patrol pencils, and I must say, these pages were a lot of fun to work on.

Once I finished these up I started inking some Teen Titans pages by José Luis García-López that I found on the internet a while back. But, I lost steam as I realized I had pressing work on my own projects that needed doing.

I might return to those pages when I have some more downtime and see if I can’t put together a proper inking portfolio someday. In the meantime, this is a gallery of a few of the new samples, and a few pages of my published inking work.

I’ve been on a pin-up kick since finishing up and getting Wahoo Morris Book 2 printed.

The impetus started as an exercise in staying busy while sick with the flu, then it just became an exercise in fun while playing around with some styles I haven’t tackled in a while.

Continuing the theme of my last post, all of the pieces I have been working on have been finishing up earlier ideas and sketches.

The following three pin-ups (now finished) were all rough sketches that I was going to include as-is in my upcoming art book. While I was on the kick I figured why not finish them off.

Now that they are done I thought it might be interesting to show what the old pieces looked like before “finishing” them!

The Conan and John Carter sketches date back to 2010 when I was attempting to follow along with the ComicTwart sketch blog and was actively keeping a digital sketchbook.

The Tarzan/La of Opar piece was on the back of a location design from one of the animation studios I worked at in the early aughts, so it is the oldest unfinished idea I’ve used.

I have dozens of similar pin-up ‘ideas’ scribbled on layouts and in workbooks going back to the beginning of my career, so I could keep this process up for months, but I think it’s time to get back to some sequential story pages.

Whether I continue/finish any of the partially done stories in my archives, or start something brand new is a decision I’ll probably wait to make until Monday morning!