Spidey Stampede: A Decades-Delayed Office Dash!

This is a drawing I just completed in pen and ink on 11" x 14" Aquabee sketchbook paper (nice stuff that takes pen and ink really well; it's almost like Bristol board). I had this pad for ages and decided to cut the spiral-wire binding and use it for warm-up drawings and convention sketches.

What's interesting about this drawing is that it's based on an old sketchbook sketch of Spider-Man that, I'm guessing, was drawn circa 1998 or so. I never used to date my sketches--I kept a sketchbook mainly for anatomical studies and warm-up exercises; I was being published on a regular basis in those days so there was no need to keep track of exactly when I drew something--publication dates would have sufficed. Anyway, the original Spidey figure here was probably no more than four or five inches tall; it was roughly penciled and inked over with a brush.

This sketch, I should mention, may have been a study in preparation for pitching some samples to Marvel, but it may have been just a relaxing study. I used to draw Spider-Man more than any other character before I turned professional - we're talking a lot of webs drawn during a lot of indoor recesses in fourth grade.

I've written about this before on various blogs, but around 2012, as my graduate studies neared completion, I began going through old sketchbooks and scanning figures such as this to see if I could salvage them. There was no commercial incentive for this; I just wanted to see if I could ink some old sketches and turn them into finished drawings. A number of drawing of Clarissa James (Ms. Megaton Man) seemed to lend themselves to this process, and yielded good results. I've inked dozens of figures of her, Megaton Man, and other characters and you can find the results on my various blogs. I've found that this only works with sketches dating back to about 1989--before that, my drawing style is just too different to make it worthwhile.

This particular pose of Spidey has long been on my list, so I finally traced it and inked it yesterday and today. I added some stock office workers (the desktop computer has been updated; the original sketch indicated an old CTR monitor), and voila, a pretty nice result. I'm thinking this desire to salvage figures from old sketchbooks has pretty much run its course--although I've developed an obsession with finishing everything I start that has gotten so bad, I'm actually finishing off old, discarded big-company sample pages and even Megaton Man rejects!

More recently, I have a stockpile of tight pencil drawings (my penciling has gotten tighter in recent years simply because I'm never sure when I'll be able to sit back down to complete a given drawing or project, and I don't want to have to go through the kind effort and guessing an old sketch like the above requires. Most drawing now are inked either immediately or at least within recent memory.

Stay tuned for more posts from the Ol' Drawing Board!
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Read my YA prose experiment The Ms. Megaton Man Maxi-Series - new chapter every Friday!