Return of the special Patreon cover-art preview! (Patreon)

Following up on an earlier post showing work stages for the variant cover I drew for January's Venom: The End one-shot, above are the final colors for the piece, courtesy of the fine folks at the coloring studio Guru eFX. Heck, might as well paste the colors in below, so I can comment on the sad fact that the version that went public yesterday was missing the TIME'S ARROW lettering, due to an unfortunate blunder on my part:

Yeahp, Time's Arrow plays a major role in this story, to put it mildly. More on this nightmarish one-shot later (which I wrote and laid out as well), which is still causing me hassles even on Thanksgiving. Damn your symbiote eyes, one-shot!

How about work stages on another cover illo, folks? Why not! This time, let's go for Venom to Poison, okay?

See, I'm doing a cover for an upcoming Udon Street Fighter Swimsuit Special, this time featuring the somewhat infamous Poison from Final Fight, who apparently rocks the whimsical "police bikini"  seen below as an unlockable dealie in SF 5:

Yeah, didn't want to do another "standin' around looking sexy" illo, so I thought I'd show ol' Poison doing some surfing. Had a lot of trouble with the inks below, minimalistic as they might seem:

I'd originally planned to ink all the water and waves around Poison to make the original art more appealing, but as I knew that my buddy Ryan Kinnaird would be coloring the piece, I eventually said "screw that" and left the wave as little more than an outline.

Color guide next:

To be honest, I frickin' hated the way the inks turned out, but Ryan's doing a great job of salvaging the illo, as seen in the incomplete "work in progress" image below:

The Poison figure actually looks shockingly okay with some flat colors applied, much to my surprise.

Anyhoo, I'll post the final Swimsuit Special colors here at some point in a follow-up post. Meanwhile, back to work on another bunch of Venom: The End correx, before I trundle off to a hearty Thanksgiving meal. Have a happy (American) Turkey day, folks!