Stand Still, Naked Man

Last week I went to a figure drawing session for the first time in over a year. I'm definitely out of practice. I decided to take just copy paper and my little bag of pens and pencils. Most of these images were done in 2-5 minutes. I started out (above) with a ball point pen. After doing a couple of those I decided to do some in pencil. Unfortunately, I had nothing softer than an F lead, which led to some pretty light drawings (one of which is the next one).
Then I moved on to my Col-Erase pencils, but due to the limited time and the nature of the tool, I really wasn't able to build up much contrast.

The following images were from the last pose I stayed for. The pencil drawing (which I used Photoshop to bump up the contrast considerably) was a failure in terms of capturing the "gesture" of the model.

In frustration, I turned to my cartooning abilities and turned out this quick drawing which I am much more happy with. The essence of cartooning is being able to distill an image into very simple graphic terms and still get at the truthiness of the subject. In many ways cartooning can be more representative and true than detailed observational, "realistic" drawing. I definitely think that was the case here.

I attended this session with my friend and fellow comic artist, Chris Samnee. He has posted a couple of his sketches from that evening here.
On a side note, I thought our model had a real Terrence Stamp, "Zod" quality about him.

O.G., Original Goonie

This may be my favorite commission to date. I like the drawing but it was the ink washes that made this so much fun to do. I've had a friend who has been encouraging me to experiment with washes but I've always been afraid that I'd ruin whatever work I applied them to. I thought a Goon piece would be the perfect venue for that as it keeps with the style of Eric Powell's work. I had never done washes before and I was really hestitant to do it on a piece someone had payed me for. I was sitting there staring at the finished black and white drawing and knowing that it was a finished piece that I could have no shame in mailing off. Yet...I felt that the work was begging for the ink washes. I sucked it up, prepared to redo the whole piece if I screwed up, and proceeded to splash my watery ink all over the work. It was so much fun to do and I think the final drawing turned out pretty good. What do you think?