Bone Tribute Piece (Patreon)

Jeff Smith's BONE has always held a special place in my heart. It's the first book that truly ignited my desire to make my own creator-owned comics and I'm honestly unsure what my career would look like today had I not discovered a compilation of the first six-issues back in the early 90's.

So, when about eight years ago Graphix asked a few of it's then authors to contribute to an anniversary edition of their publication of BONE, I literally shouted "YES!" to my computer screen. Then I typed out that remark and emailed it. The recent and sad* cancellation news of Netflix's animated series reminded me of the piece I drew and how I never shared it anywhere online. So here you are!

I found a bunch of process pics when I went hunting for it so figured I might as well share those too. Since the Red Dragon was so instrumental to the narrative of the story, I thought it might be fun to showcase a lot of the characters inside a silhouette of the Dragon's iconic head. I roughed up my idea digitally at first, used a lightbox to traditionally pencil it on Bristol, scanned that it, and used Photoshop to color underneath it. It's a technique I used quite a bit at the time that I'm pretty sure I stopped doing it because it was so time-consuming. The result is a nice, textured illustrative look though and might be fun to revisit sometime.

I'd certainly draw some things differently now (Thorn for sure), but as an older piece I don't think it's half-bad. And it's amazing that I got to contribute a little something to my most favorite of comics.

Also, for those interested, I somehow still have the original pencil art for it! Since I don't see any reason to hold on to it now, I'll open it up for sale in a follow-up post (Wild Space Cats only).

*After three false starts, I'm starting to wonder if we're maybe dodging a bullet here. I'd love to see BONE animated as much as the next person, but the likelihood of it even holding a candle to the comic itself is pretty rare. It'd be great (at least financially) for Jeff, but maybe BONE is just one of those stories better off staying solely the way it is?