Creating Cameos

Last summer I volunteered for what turned out to be artist Renae De Liz's most excellent Womanthology comic book project. By contributing, I hoped to gain some practical experience as a comic book artist (a long-time dream of mine), while at the same time create art for a great cause. It turned out to be so much more than that!

Cameos
One of my creative tasks for the Womanthology: Heroic project was doing cameos of a few of the Kickstarter contributors. My writing partner, Kimberly Komatsu, wrote the script to a wonderful short story called "The Aviator and the Elephant". It had multiple characters which meant I could do more than one cameo.

I ended up doing six.

In order to capture the individual look of each of the contributors, I did a variety of sketches for each subject using the photo(s) they submitted, and then did some more sketches of them in character and in costume in the same poses (or close to) for the story panels. Some of the cameos were in two panels, but most were in only one. Here are some of the preliminary panel thumbnails and sketches I did for the cameos:






After all of that, I did final pencils of each of the cameo panels along with the other panels for each page. Here those are, in no particular order and without text (FYI, there were 4 pages for the story with a total of 35 panels):






And then I scanned the final pencils, patched them together and inked/colored/painted the pages digitally in Photoshop. Here are the final color panels of the cameos (again, without text):






More about my interesting, always fun and challenging experiences, and what I learned about creating comics while working on Womanthology in a later post. :)