Kinda nostalgic. Tried my hand at drawing my main character that I started comicing when I was but the weest of larvae and all the changes it took from his first incarnation to when he'd eventually become Bones. i definitely cant remember how I used to draw em, but for better or for cringe, it was fun! Lol, you even get a primordial bishi Bones in there. Bet ya didn't know that! Yeah, neither does he. Don't tell him.
Definitely all a product of their times, I'd say.

Would be interested in seeing anyone else's old stuff. They grow up so fast.


Tried to clean this up from lined paper. eh.


EDIt: Found a few more things in the meantime.

Here's a proto Gretchen. She was this spunky woman-boxer.



and old Bones.



First sketch of Exis"



….shouldnt have logged into Photobucket.

Someone find me a beer so i can cry into it.

These were my first concept sketches from late 2001. I sucked way more than I now suck. I was using a “how to draw manga” guide, which sucked and I sucked at using it. (And I tried “traditional inking.” Never again…)

lol! I love the obligatory kawaii poses mixed in there. Beginner anime days, I remember those. Yours seemed far less edgy than mine, lol.

Pit! That is Jusssst the artwork to use for tomorrow's newspost! :D

I love old sketchbooks, apologies for the awful photography but my scanner is a pain in the arse to plug in and stuff.

those sketchbooks are absolutely fantastic. i like looking at the little differences between some of the characters.

Do you guys find that these differences are differences you make deliberately/bruptly or that they just sort of happen over time? or both? what sort of things make you change? (i like hearing specific examples rather than general explanations, the devil's in the details.)

Some of the changes I can remember come from another similarily clustered book of words/phrases/plot ideas/weird names I thought of just before I fell asleep and then had to find the book and my phone/light to note them down and ruined any chance I ever had of getting to sleep or ending this sentence.

I think it was the discovered phrase ‘lilac afro’, that triggered a change from the odd original/automaton looking ‘Pickles Lumbar’ into the super buff egotist he now is. Neurons connect in the oddest of ways and I started to view him as a cross between Kramer from Seinfeld and one of those sun bronzed people that apply for Big Brother. ^^

Both. I'd take breaks and do a lot of fan art to try different ways of doing things. So I ended up mostly developing a comfortable simplified version of the portrait style drawing (which was detailed but so off and ugly, deep in an uncanny valley) I did for art classes a lifetime ago and less the forced weird manga style that I just couldn't do. (Honestly, I didn't care for either style. I had to have a starting point, though.)

Adding color changed the whole game. That also evolved. I have always sucked with traditional media for coloring, but I trialed and errored things digitally.

Some fashion studies scanned from my sketchbook. They are outfits that were supposed to appear in Girlsquadx number 3, which never got published.

Drawn circa 1994

Those are some fancypants pieces man!

I didn't think I could contribute to this since I remember Pinky and CC not really undergoing much change since I came up with them for a painting series in the late 90s and then turned them into a comic…
But I found a sketchbook just now that proves that wrong. I have PAGES and pages of designed for ear shape, eye shape, hairstyles, faces… all sorts of horrible manga experiments (I could never get that style right), and lots and lots of her tromper!

The current tromper in Pinky TA is meant to depict an earlier prototype model. When I drew it I was imagining what one would look like… going through this sketchbook though I found that it REALLY WAS the prototype model that I came up with first! I didn't even remember that I'd originally drawn it that way. o_O

I'd share my pics but there are too many and they're old dirty pencil drawings. I might take some photos of some of the more interesting stages.

Finally FIXED Pit's bloody signature banners…

Man these are all so AWESOME! I have had a blast looking through all of them. I'll throw in some of my old stuff.

This is one of the pics I made for my students when they succeeded (unfortunately I don't have any of the comics available easily)



(I cringe seeing how stiff my forms were)


These two are premordial versions of two of my main fantasy characters from my novels, when they were still a vampire and a werewolf. Don't ask.

I managed to dig up some really old stuff haha! And it is nooooot great.




This next one is interesting. It is a character I did the visual design for and who went on to inspire another one in our upcoming issue of The Constellation Chronicle. Bit of progress here. :)

Wow these are so good…

I never really changed my concept for Kimber Lee any - I just got better at drawer her as time went on. You can see the eye-bleeds in the early pages…

Interestingly, before this comic, WHEN I took my time and was drawing from an image, I was pretty good, but one of my stated goals for my comic was to get better with using just a few references (or none!), drawing poses, etc only from my mind, and drawing much faster…! It was a fairly painful process!!

I posted some of my concept art for The Good Walker in my Godstrain Extras comic, which you can sift through if you like…!

I worked this up in commemoration for my 25th anniversary of publishing in 2016. We'll, the characters are now 31!

From way back in 1998…

If they aged from that time… how old would they be in 2018?