Local Hero: A Page of Confrontation

For your enjoyment and enticement...

Local Hero: In the cells with the Eagles and a Gator

Thought you might appreciate a visual update...

Mood Piece

Something that came into mind almost fully-formed...

More colour experimentation

Yours to enjoy or not, done with Pitt Brush Pens and Prismacolor Premiers(among other devices). I like these tools.

Side-Sketches for Local Hero: Jack Little

Clearing the decks

Because I felt like it, and because it now feels like I'm making additional progress on the art front...a picture of my drafting table.

Character Design/Studies - U.S. Steel and Gator Jones

Hi again. I'm revisiting Gator Jones for a little bit here, and throwing in some facial expression studies of U.S. Steel - one of the antagonists of Local Hero - while I'm at it.

Something that got drilled into my head in animation school - rightly - is the need to explore how your characters would express their every mood variation. Or at least as many as you could imagine them expressing, publicly or privately.

I must post entries here more often.

Covers That Almost Made It

Here's one of them. Might use the idea somewhen else down the line anyway...

Another set of sketches and an offer

Today I'm including some practice sketches of Elijah, one of the supporting cast of Local Hero. You might have seen glimpses of him earlier here, and at my Gallery site.

Also, an offer:

If you've got a favourite character you'd like a sketch of, so long as nothing worse than PG-ratings is involved re: that character, I'm available for commissions. Contact me at williams.dwight@gmail.com and we can discuss details of which character, how to deliver the sketch, and whatnot. Consider it an opportunity to wrap up a surprise gift for that special comics fan in your life, whoever it may be.

One term is non-negotiable: I reserve the right to save a hi-res scan of whatever I draw for you and post it here, or any other blog of my choosing.

Local Hero News

The preview at Wellbound Productions begins in earnest.

More news to follow...

Page 17 in Progress...

...and I thought one panel might be an interesting sampler to whet the appetites...

Local Hero: Urban Design

Official disclaimer time: I'm not an architect. Never been one. Fantasized about it on occasion, though. And when you see the design work by the likes of Anton Furst going into Gotham City for either the first Burton-directed Bat-movie or the comic books, or Tony Harris' work on Opal City in the second Starman series, you might begin to understand why I'd feel that way.

So, when Ian Gould sent me the initial scripts and background material for what's now Local Hero, you might understand another of the lures that got me on board as his artist of record.

I wanted to get right into it, complete with maps. I figured that between assorted graphic design and CAD packages in my collection, I could do a reasonably competent job of it. Not in Rick Sternbach or Eliot Brown's league, obviously, but still competent.

I wish I could recall a particular path of evolution in terms of how the place comes together, but there's no real path at all.

So for the time being I'm going to leave you with a sampling of artwork culled from my sketchbooks. Some of it's going to show up as parts of Shuster, others...for different places, I expect, as Local Hero continues beyond its first arc.

Enjoy.

Local Hero - A first sampling in Character Design

We've all seen them in print and online over the years: pieces of how a character evolves from first sketch to the finished pages.

Ian and I talked it over, and for today's edition, we'll cover Gator Jones, one of the keys of the first Local Hero arc. Gator's one of those guys who always seem to get the short end of the genetic stick in the genre as we know it. If the nickname wasn't a giveaway on that score, well...

Now this first drawing was the earliest design sketch I could find or remember for Gator, dating back to late 2002.

No, I'm not kidding about that. All good things take their appointed time, after all.

Anyway: I took the "Gator" nickname quite literally, of course, and this had to be remedied somewhat...

And of course, further refinements followed:

Now we move onto some rough layouts for his first appearance on-panel...


And I think I'll refrain from showing the finished page. For now, at least.


One thing that kept bugging me from the first redesign onward is the fact that we've seen guys with Gator's particular luck of the genetic draw before in other fictons, in comic books and out. I've wanted to evolve him into someone distinct from anyone else we're already familiar with. I hope I succeed in that. It'll be for you to judge, though...