CONVENTIONLESS CON SKETCHES: Priss and Nene from BGC! (Patreon)

In what will likely be a recurring feature, here are a pair of 11" X 14" commissions intended for delivery at the now-postponed (if not eventually cancelled) Emerald City Comic-Con, featuring Priss and Nene from the vintage anime Bubblegum Crisis. (For the uninitiated, I wrote and drew a 4-issue Dark Horse Comics miniseries, 1994's Bubblegum Crisis: Grand Mal, featuring the characters.)

A few words:

Note that this Priss piece can be oriented two different ways, hence my deliberately ambiguous signatures:

Note that the first draft of the illo didn't have those inked shadows on the Priss hardsuit...

...but the suit felt too open and value-free, so I went back after the fact and inked in  "shadow squiggles" to add the contrast levels I want and need. However, regular Sharpies wouldn't work over the waxy blue Prismacolor colored pencils I'd applied over her suit, so I had to use a King Size Sharpie(!) to render the shadows. The process was nerve-wracking and the results not ideal, but still better than the shadow-free version.

The Priss illo is a rather obscure in-joke, BTW, as I based it on—nay, traced it from—a pose I used for a 1997-ish Wildstorm trading card featuring Roxy (Freefall) from the superhero series Gen13. 

This one g-d illo's pose has been swiped by at least a dozen different sticky-fingered artists, so I thought it would be amusing to rip myself off for once. I recently saw the illo ripped off as a display pose for an art app of sorts, which grates on me more than a tad; swiping a pose for a piece of fan art is one thing—and Lord knows I've done that before in decades past—but ripping it off for commercial and art-instructional purposes seems obnoxious to me. 

Ah, but here's the punchline: Steven, the commissioner of the Priss illo, also owns the original artwork for the Roxy trading-card piece! The circle is complete, folks!

And then we close things out with a Nene hardsuit illo. First up, the rough:

And then the final version:

Had to break out a couple different reference books to get those g-d hardsuit details right, as I can still pretty much draw those suckers from memory, save for the more obscure points such as Nene's backpack and waldo "hand." Wheeee!

I was also flailing around a tad desperately for backgrounds on these two pieces, which proved annoyingly if not shockingly time-consuming. With the next few "conventionless con sketches" in this series, I worked up a new and interesting—and much faster!—background approach for illos of a commissioner's OCs (original characters), which you'll see in my next "sketch dump" of these recently produced pieces. 

Tomorrow on this here Patreon: "DiD Wednesday" (for the $5+ tiers) continues serialization of an especially goofy early-2000s commissioned story of the semi-competent-at-best Pint-Size(d) Ninja Platoon struggling to distress a very familiar damsel.