Quitely

I googled myself yesterday to find that the three first image results were all drawings that I had done for Project Rooftop. Not sure how Google's search filter thing works but I'm guessing that means that those are the drawings that got the most exposure to people online. What's funny about that is that for Project Rooftop, I intentionally try to draw like someone else, Frank Quitely.

So, I wish I could articulate to those of you that don't know who that is, why he is as awesome as he is, but I'm sure if you look around, you can find people to do that to a far greater effect. In fact, here's one.

Even though I have tried pretty consciously to mimic Quitely because he's become one of my favorite artists, I generally fail pretty hard at doing that because my basic drawings aren't very good. Here are the pencils for a Wolverine drawing which was the first time I got an honorable mention.



It's pretty old. Wolverine's face is hilarious and not Quitely at all but this is before I just tried to straight up ape him completely. Here is that drawing colored. In the one that comes up in google there are more drawings on the side of it but those sucked so I cropped them off this one.



This also shows up in that google search eventually, it was a comparison of how I drew in 2005 compared to 2010. As you can see, 2005 was an unfortunate time for me. And yet people never told me how bad I was. Enablers. Very nice guy saw this on twitter and put it on his Firestorm blog. So that's why it shows up.



Another Project Rooftop contest was Aquaman. I love Aquaman so I had to enter it. Here are the inks for that. Never scanned the pencils because they were too light and loose. The benefit to trying to draw like Quitely for me has been that I can draw way less initially because I do almost all the rendering in ink. Maybe that's a problem.



Here's that drawing colored. That splashing behind him was a lot funner to draw than to color. I'm sure that shows because I didn't bother coloring it. Also, that A on his chest in gray looks really weird. I thought it worked even though it feels completely out of place. I've never been a very good designer either.



When Dwayne McDuffie died recently, there was a call from Project Rooftop for Static drawings and so I did one. I can honestly say, I never watched the Static Shock cartoon nor did I read many of McDuffie's comics but his impact on the industry was undeniable and I wanted to draw something to honor that with the other people that contributed in that.



And so I did another shameless Quitely inspired drawing.



Lately, I've been drawing stuff that I really liked and drew growing up because I think a lot of the things people my age were into growing up is starting to become nostalgically cool. So I drew the Power Rangers. The idea was to make it like those awesome covers that Quitely does that are sparse but have a big impact. Yeah. About that. Didn't work out.



But you know, eh... whatever.



I think there's something really helpful about drawing like people like Quitely who has a very distinct style because it seeps into your drawing when you stop drawing and the more you do that with different artists, the more you get a style that is a Frankenstein's monster of cool people. Right now, I don't think I have a monster but we'll see how that goes.