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CONVENTIONLESS CON SKETCHES: Priss and Nene from BGC!
🕑 Added 2020-04-07 13:01:01 +0000 UTCIn 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.
Comments
John Staton
Whoa.
John Staton
Whoa.
Strypgia
A happy reminder that the first 'Adam Warren' thing I really ran into in the wild was BCG: Grand Mal.
Steven Ng
Here it is: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/beanbandit/kenichi-sonodas-bean-bandit-new-anime-project/description
Otaku Twenty-Four Seven
Thanks for your reply about the KS I'll go look it up!
Steven Ng
Kenichi Sonoda does not own BGC rights. I read in other places that the rights are jointly held by Japanese companies who are now estranged from each other. Sonodasan is working on a new Bean Bandit anime film. Details at Kickstarter.
Steven Ng
Adam, I love how these turned out. Thanks so much. Will contact you later by email to finish up the transaction.
The D-Wrek
These are amazing. Seeing your BG (or DP) work is always a pleasure to see! I’ve always dug your interpretations of the Bubblegum IP (and DP for that matter) more than the source material (which I also like). It also made me wonder if back in the day you had worked with other anime/manga IPs in some hypothetical world the same way you did with these which ones would they have been. X)
Otaku Twenty-Four Seven
These are fantastic, Adam! I loved everything about BGC Grand Mal I only wish you had the inclination and opportunity to have done more with that property. Do you ever talk with K1 Sonoda or are the rights to them with someone else?
