THE RANDO'S CORNUCOPIA returns! (Patreon)

Time for another installment of the sporadically recurring Patreon feature The Rando's Cornucopia, aka "a grab-bag post of miscellaneous odds & ends lurking on my hard drive."

And now, a few words on said odds & ends:

First off is an illo I drew circa the early 2000s depicting Jaeger from my friend Carla Speed McNeil's great comic Finder, with purty colors provided by my buddy Ryan Kinnaird. For once, this is an actual piece of uncommissioned fan art, done just because I was so enamored with Carla's daring and challenging storytelling on Finder.

The Jaeger figure isn't photoreferenced, but that tree behind him certainly is; I believe I reffed that from a coffee-table book of "unusual trees from across the globe," or something like that.

Above is a color test done back when Dark Horse and I were briefly contemplating the idea of coloring my layout-based story Dirty Pair: Quick and Dirty (as serialized in full here a few months ago) for publication. I didn't follow up on this concept because I thought the results were too wonkily sketchy-looking—or perhaps because communications were already breaking down with the Japanese license-holders. Not sure, TBH. 

Next up are the initial design roughs for the foul-mouthed yet formal ninja "F**king Oyuki-chan," as first seen in Empowered vol.5: 

These loose sketches are actually a rarity for early Empowered, as I usually designed characters on the fly—in fact, on the page—rather than bothering with preliminary design roughs.

Note that Oyuki-chan shows a hint of an actual facial expression in the rough above; I hadn't yet decided that she would be perpetually expressionless throughout the series.

For a clearer view of what the character looks like in her finalized form, next up is a 2009 con sketch of F**king Oyuki-chan. Note that her outfit is in part photoreferenced from pics of THAT leather jacket: 

With this sketch we see her proper, blank-eyed look, meant to evoke Quint's famous soliloquy about sharks from JAWS: 

"Sometimes that shark, he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You  know the thing about a shark, he’s got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a  doll’s eye. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be livin’. Until he  bites ya and those black eyes roll over white." 

Next up are two of the very few photos I possess of myself from the late 90s, as I had little interest in such pics back then—and still don't today, judging by my aversion to selfies. I believe these photos were probably taken for the "How to Draw Manga (sort of)" feature I did for Wizard magazine circa 1997: 

Lurking behind me on the drawing board is a layout page from my three-issue "Grunge! The Movie" arc on Gen13 Bootleg, which I was working on whilst crashing with at a friend's apartment in Providence, Rhode Island; next to that is a copy of the Asian World of Martial Arts catalog I was using as photoreference.

I should probably try to overcome my selfie aversion and take a present-day pic of myself with my hair down, as the results are pretty wacky-looking. My hair is still almost as dark as it was in 1997, but my eyebrows and facial hair have long since gone almost entirely gray, for a truly peculiar look overall.

For the Wizard piece, we wound up using a tuxedo-sporting photo from the same friend's wedding, as seen in the cameo "biopic" below:

I'm vaguely alarmed to be unsure whether or not I've actually posted the entire Wizard "How To"  piece here; I've been posting every g-d weekday on this Patreon for well over a year, so it's easy to lose track of what the heck I've put up here. If any kindly Patrons can remember if I've done so, feel free to let me know in the comments below!

And that's it for another installment of The Rando's Cornucopia, folks. Hope this was random enough for ya!

NEXT WEEK ON THIS HERE PATREON: Time for our usual Monday double dose of life drawings from photoreference, along with the high-res raw Photoshop scans for both sketch sets!