And the winner is… Now, this guy emailed me after I’d already narrowed my field down to seven or eight artists and was talking to them about the possibility of doing page roughs at a cut rate. I got his sample pages he sent and there was a lot of, “Jesus wept,” going on in my head, because I loved his style beyond words, but I was afraid I was already stretching myself awfully thin with audition costs. But I liked what I saw so much I had to write…
seven of eight…
This is where it really started to kill me. Female artist, extremely stylistic and punchy, very much standing out of the crowd. This is the stuff that made me start wailing about my doom on my blog. *grin*
six of eight
Down to my finalists, now. Bruno sent me character sketches and page roughs on the level I was expecting–loose and general–and I was really happy with what I saw, especially with the character sketches with the dynamic body shapes and movement. Very nice.
five of eight
Now we come to the more recent stuff… I’m pretty sure this guy is only a kid, relatively speaking. He told me he’s only been drawing sequential art seriously for a few months, and that his biggest influences were Jim Lee and Joe Maduriera; I think the latter particularly shows in his work, which has a more manga feel than I was going for. OTOH, the initial gallery he pointed me at was good enough to pursue him a little bit. I think in another couple-three years, he’s going to…
four of eight
Jerry did a couple of character sketches for me. The first one is probably my favorite single drawing anybody’s done of Chance. But after this I never heard from him again, so it didn’t go anywhere!