About a year ago, I contributed to an art book on kickstarter called Then & Now. The editors picked a number of illustrators and asked us to find old drawings from childhood to redraw now that we are professionals.

As with last year, I went to my high school sketch book (I was approximately 15 or 16 when I had this one) and plucked out two random character pages.

I have many, many pages like this in my sketchbooks from high school: random characters with no larger story attached to them. Often, the type of character I was drawing reflects the type of art I was looking at that moment. These are on opposite ends of the book, but they feel as though they are strongly influenced by the Brian Froud/Kieth Parkinson art books I had at the time (with just a splattering of manga).

As I redid them, I wanted to build them into a larger visual story. Much of my work now focuses on environment as much as character, and I wanted to reflect that storytelling in my redraw.

Here are my thumbs!  Those those silly creatures never made the final elf drawing, and I ended up winging the composition for that one. — Here are my thumbs! Those those silly creatures never made the final elf drawing, and I ended up winging the composition for that one.

This is the analog image for that sorceress, done in red and black ink/colored pencil on Bee Stipple paper. All I can say is she loves fish spirits. I wanted to push my color separation technique in these images, and rendered gradation is tough to separate.

But I think it turned out okay!

Next up was that warrior elf. I really did up the background in this. I even added in some statues that appear in my Microcosmics universe, so I suppose I need to fold her into the canon of that series, now.