Frank's Sketchbook Entry of the Day

Looking for more dark, shadowy things to draw, I remembered that there was a The Shadow comic book based on the old radio show. I was thinking of the late '80s Howard Chaykin-era art of The Shadow, which I'm pretty sure I drew some pictures of "back in the day." But looking at artwork, the cover of the Shadow Portfolio by Bill Sienkiewicz from 1987 which reproduces the first 6 covers of the series that he did, was exactly the sort of image I was looking for. Sienkiewicz is an amazing artist and has a very wide variety of styles. And in fact the cover image comes from one of the stories. In fact, it might have been along the lines of what I had remembered from long ago. Here's a link to the original page, the color version, and the cover. The cover is what I used as a reference.

It was also kind of challenging to draw.

Twice I tried to do a basic layout in pencil on the black paper (it's shiny enough to see with enough light), and twice I wound up erasing it because it was terrible and things weren't fitting together. I had tried to break it up into zones mentally to fit the pieces together, but that wasn't working. So I took a white piece of paper and did a quick sketch of it, and it looked like shit. So I tried again on the other side, and just drew what I was seeing. It was still fairly crappy, but I was sort of starting to see how the elements would come together. So I just started drawing with the white ink on the black paper, kind of "organically" trying to just guess how long the strokes would be and where the different elements would fit. It was "not terrible" and I did some correcting with black ink, and refining a little and I think this one turned out OK. It has some texture, the shape of the nose, the suggestion of hair, the one eye looks OK, and the suggestion of the scarf. The full size image is here.