One of the reasons that I haven’t been as successful as myself and others feel I should be in breaking into the Big Two is that I am being a perfectionist, so I would change faces or styles or details, finish a page, then erase the face or change a hairstyle, all sorts of things that limited my portfolio. I can and do sometimes design on the page – that is I would not predesign a character or object I would create it directly on the page. This works, except when the design doesn’t work or looks wonky, and being a perfectionist I would want to correct it, so erase, start again. You don’t tell an editor it’s incomplete because I wanted to change something, or improve something, or perfect something they want finished product. They want to know you won’t spend months perfecting a page when they need product right away. So I used to end up starting samples and not finishing them, because I would invest only so much time and then I would move on. Working full time jobs and drawing in the evenings, I would want fresh samples so those sample pages I spent weeks working on, I would shelve and then start another set of sample pages. So I dug out my incomplete samples and will post some.
Darkness and Witchblade have always fascinated me, and I’ve always wanted to do some pages for either book. There are some really nice textures available in both – in these pages I did the Darklings as just shadow creatures, but I have pages and sketches where I’ve done them as almost every variant imaginable, from super deformed characters to Brian Froud type fairies beings, fanged horror movie gremlins and others…
The Darkness Armor has no definitive form from what I can gather, so I’ve drawn that in organic variants and anime inspired mecha.
