I’ll start off today with a small selection of heads that I did yesterday as warmups. I was inspired by seeing some of the same kinds of things that I’ve been seeing from Alex Toth on his site and elsewhere. They’re a series of wonderful profile sketches of interesting characters– and as with ANYTHING from Toth, they’re brilliant. I can’t hope to compare with my own feeble attempts– but one thing I DID learn is that drawing old people (and in this case, men) are MUCH MORE fun to draw than young folks. They have such interesting points of character, like larger noses, ears– and you can add fun facial hair. The one younger face I drew just serves to highlight that– it’s rather boring.

And I’ll follow up with another layout vs printed page selection– this time from TELLOS #7. Unfortunately, at the time, I wasn’t scanning my pencil pages in to document them digitally (I don’t even remember if we had a computer in the studio at the time– but if we did, it never occurred to me to actually save the pencils as files). I’ve probably got xerox copies of the page around somewhere in the house, but I don’t really have time to scramble through my rat’s nest to try to find them. I tried to choose a page that had a nice variety of the characters on it.

THE LAYOUT

THE FINISHED, COLORED PAGE

And finally– I just got this email forwarded to me by my art dealer Scott Cates– literally as I’m putting this post together. It’s always so incredibly gratifying to get an email from someone who has been inspired by my work.

“Dear Mike

This is just a letter to thank you and to let you know that your work on the

Fantastic Four inspired me to pick up a pencil again. For years I tried to

get into comics, but never got my artwork right and due to the fact that I

was slow and never worked hard enough. Now after seeing your fantastic work

I got back into it and is busy writing and designing my own 24 issue

mini-series that I’ll start to submit next year. Some people suggested

because I live in South Africa that that will count against me, but I don’t

believe that. I hope you work on Fantastic Four for a long time. So thank

you again for being such an inspiration.

Keep well

Tim”

I’ve said this several times before in various forums– but it bears repeating: Getting emails like this one from Timothy Le Roux in South Africa is not even remotely one of the reasons I got into drawing comic books for a living– but it is a wonderful “fringe benefit” that helps me to ride out the periods when drawing for a living gets, at times, difficult and trying. So for that, Tim– THANK YOU. And for those that tell you that living in South Africa will hold you back– don’t believe them. That’s the beauty of modern internet technology– you can live ANYWHERE and still get your work seen… whether it’s as a web strip, on message boards, or whatever. And there are folks from all over the globe working for Marvel and DC.

OK– that’s it for today.

Mike