I’ve realized lately that I haven’t been drawing much outside of comics and freelance work.  To heck with that!  If you’re going to draw for a living you need to find ways to preserve the joy, experimentation, and spontaneity inherent to the act.

At the same time, if you’re a goal-focused person like me, it’s hard to just sit down with blank paper and goof off for an hour (unless you’re on hold with tech support).

So once a week I’m going to try to doodle a character from somebody else’s work, starting with comics and maybe later branching out into prose fiction.  Perhaps this can also serve as a sort of Recommended Reading list.

This week:  Bottle Woman, from Order of Tales by Evan Dahm (of Rice Boy fame). Watercolor, oil pencil, colerase pencil.

What a wonderful character design!  That stopper head is just brilliant, and the simplicity of her features belies a complicated and moody character.  (the same could be said for Evan’s art overall!)  I don’t think she’s actually green, or that her contents are blue, but it was the palette that seemed like fun.

I picked up Order of Tales at SPX on a personal mandate to Read New Things, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it as strange and absorbing.  It’s rare to pick up a story that’s so immediately distinctive.  A lot of people doing fantasy comics can spend a million years designing political systems and special ceremonial corsetry and researching weather patterns in an attempt to create a world so dense and realistic that a reader can immerse themselves in it, but Evan manages to suck you in with just a few brush strokes.