Loose sketches

I do a lot of loose sketches, a lot. I have a habit of sketching heads or busts of characters from stories that I'm reading, it helps me keep my mind on the story and it helps me to mentally solidify the characters. Most of these are less than 6"x6".

These first two are sketches done while reading R. E. Howard's Almuric.
Random male Yaga.

And the Yaga's black queen Yasmeena.

Next up some Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Very rough preliminary head sketch of a Kalkar.

A slightly cleaner head sketch of a Kalkar and some random woman.

And who can forget Tarzan. Here's a couple of head/bust sketches where I was trying to work out what my version of Tarzan would look like.

Sometimes I decide that one of my character head shots are too much fun to go to waste. Once I have an idea of what the character looks like (and I'm sure that I can replicate the look), I start doing fast preliminary composition sketches, this is what those sketches look like.

This picture however, never came to fruition.


This is a slightly more refined sketch, this was going to be La of Opar.

This is about the level I take a drawing to when I'm going to transfer it for inking. Like the sketch above this one was never finished, it just wasn't quite opulent enough for my tastes.


And lastly we have Deja Thoris.

I got about halfway through this before I decided that I didn't like what was going on with her ass, and no, you may not see her ass, I didn't like it so it got cropped out. This is part of the drawing is about half to two thirds finished. Who knows, in the future I might finish up this section and try and do some “artistic erasing" to see if I can crop it down into something useable.