CONVENTIONLESS CON SKETCHES: BGC's Sylia & Linna, Beach Emp & more! (Patreon)

Behold, a few more 11" X 14"  commissions intended for delivery at the now-postponed (if not eventually cancelled) Emerald City Comic-Con, with the first one featuring Sylia and Linna 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; note also that our previous installment of conventionless con sketches featured two other characters from BGC. 

A few words:

The color-edged King-Size Sharpie "black aura" around the ladies is a new thing I tried with this set of sketches. For some reason, the blue seemed to work better than red, as you'll see.

The original, hand-drawn rough. Note that I had to tinker with scaling up both their heads in Photoshop before transferring the sketch to the final art board. Note also that the following cropped close-up of Linna's behind garnered a surprising 3500 likes on Instagram, which is the most response I've had on there in six months, if not a year:

Is that what you want, enigmatic Instagram algorithm? Is it?????

Next up is my first attempt of the 2020 "conless con" season, in which I tried a 9" X 12" sketch of "happy Emp at the beach."

Ehh, not too bad, but I find the smaller size too restrictive, as 11" X 14" gives me more room to mess around in. Cure the next two pieces, featuring my takes on a Patron's OCs:

Ehh, that chalky red pencil (Prismacolor, which is a harsh mistress indeed) edging the King-Size Sharpie aura didn't work as well as the BGC piece's blue. Still, I thought the piece worked out decently as a test for the "black aura" BG riff, which is something I belatedly ported over from my old analog life drawings. I quite like the bold values that the "KS" Sharpie adds to the pieces, gotta say.

Branched out to an extra color (neon green) with this one, but for most of these in the future I'll be sticking to the ol' red and blue pencils.

Since I'm doing very few or quite likely no conventions this year, down the road I'm gonna look into setting up further commissioned pieces like this through the ol' Patreon. I won't be able to do all that many of 'em on top of my other work while keeping the daily grind of the Patreon (and webcomic) going, so this will prrrrobably be an opportunity reserved to the $10 and $20 tiers in the early offing. Anyhoo, stand by for more details about this concept in the weeks and/or months to come, okay?

Next Monday on this here Patreon: Life drawings as usual, folks. See you then!