My new challenge: Marvel One-A-Day

I have been having a little trouble with motivating myself to draw lately, something which has not been a problem for me in a long time. I have a good job, making artwork for a living, but it's mostly 3D art, and I think I have been down on my own 2D stuff for such a long time now, that it was literally making it difficult for me to pick up a pencil even for fun.

So in order to remind myself that drawing is in fact fun, I decided yesterday that I will do an exercise. I used to fill up notebooks doing this before I decided I wanted to make art my profession, but I thought people might look down on the practice as not "serious art" when I started art school at the Guildhall.

The exercise is one in which I will draw one Marvel comics character everyday, with some kind of new twist on their costume, until I am either doing comics or concept art full time for a living (preferably Marvel comics!) or until I have run through the entire gamut of Marvel characters, which numbers well into the thousands. Because of my busy work schedule, and because I really prefer to do pencils than anything else, most of these will be sketches, but I hopefully will have time and the inspiration to do a few paintings as well.

I have a friend, (you know who you are ;) ) who keeps badgering me to post on my blog. She is a remarkable artist and she is always posting. On her blog, on CA.org, everywhere and anywhere. I wish I had her internal dedication, but I have found that I don't. All I can do is make things fun for myself, and this is my lame attempt at that. My hope is that if I force myself to post though and do something EVERY single day, I will gradually get better at things I desperately need to improve, like anatomy, poses, balance, line quality, action, and design.

At some point, if my characters improve enough I will probably move on to doing panels of my own comics or something of the like. But you know. Baby steps.

I do want to improve my sense of design, so each and every character will have some new element to their look or costume. It will probably be small at first, just little redesigns of the costume. Eventually if this goes well I will try to move on to making Juggernaut steampunk, or Wolverine from the 25th century, or whatever, but for now again baby steps...

So in the spirit of Independence Day, I give you Marvel's grand-daddy of them all, Captain America.