Milk wars

I decided to abandon this partway through. It is a recreation of the last page of the DC Comics Milk Wars crossover which combined the Justice League with the Young Animal characters, including Doom Patrol. The original, which you can see at the lower left corner, was drawn by Nick Derington. His work on the Doom Patrol books was a revelation. He’s one of those cartoonists who can seemingly draw anything, and draw it well! He thrives on the kind of weird challenges you might get when collaborating with Gerard Way.

Beyond wanting to practice the style of an artist I admire, I have been focusing on getting relative proportions right in my freehand sketches. A group scene like this one, with such a mix of depths and sizes, provides an additional level of challenge over the typical single-figure scenes I do. Getting Casey and Wonder Woman at the right sizes to make the fact they are touching each other was key to making the scene feel right.

Those aspects feel like they’re working to me. But when I got to thinking about what the done state of this picture should be, it wasn’t different from the original. Most of what I’ve done has been from photo reference, crossing media. Making a drawing from someone else’s drawing and then posting it as my own? That feels like a violation. It’s not like I asked permission to do this.

So I’m ending this piece early. You get a glimpse of just how rough my rough sketches can be! Favorite detail from the sketch? Black Canary’s fishnets actually look pretty credible.