It's a Kind of Magik...

Evening everybody! I haven't been posting too much recently, but rest assured I'm still reading and as obsessed with Hive as ever. I felt the energy tonight to drop this little work in progress and assure anyone who is interested that I am still alive and moving forward amidst the chaos of 2020, and I hope you all are holding up as well.

If there's one good thing that can come out of 2020 (other than the founding of Hive... Damn..., it's hard to believe it's only been a few months...) it might well be the release of The New Mutants movie at long last! I consider The New Mutants to be the comic that started my lifelong passion in the field more than thirty years ago now! So I've had an eager and watchful eye on the movie adaptation from the start. It was originally scheduled for release in April of 2018! The film has been pushed back multiple times due to edits, Marvel's acquisition of Fox, and most recently the coronavirus outbreak. The New Mutants is currently slated for release on August 28th. (fingers crossed)

Recently I've been re-reading the original New Mutants series which began in 1983 and ran for 100 issues, along with some assorted annuals and specials. I'm about halfway through and got the urge to do some drawing. The first team member I tackled was Illyana Rasputin, also known as Magik.

The fun little jab of dialog there came to me as I was working. I started reading The New Mutants when I was eight years old. Harry Potter wouldn't be released for another decade. I began thinking how these comics were the fiction that defined my childhood and adolescence instead of that now ubiquitous series.

Now don't get me wrong, Hermione Granger is a great character and a badass in her own right... but c'mon. I grew up with Illyana Rasputin... a mutant teleporter kidnapped into the depths of hell as a child, who learned dark sorcery and rose up to seize command of the demonic hordes of Limbo for herself. Needless to say, she finds Hogwart's curriculum... unimpressive.

Despite the "for kids" reputation that comics may have with many folks, they really haven't been that for a long time. I frequently think on the rather adult tales that I was immersing myself in at a young age and believe they served me well. And honestly, it's what made comics fun. I could tell I wasn't being "talked down to," and though I didn't understand everything I read, I could feel it was a bit edgy and subversive... and perhaps something I shouldn't have been reading at all... forbidden fruit! Instances of this have been noticeable on my re-reading of material I first encountered in my youth. I'm obviously seeing levels to the storytelling that simply did not register at a young age.

But I digress...

I want to refine these inks a bit more and then experiment with some new color techniques. This was a great little illustration for practice and fun. I've still been slowly plugging away in the background on "I Thought It Would Be Zombies...", but I'd like to make time for more one off images like this. Fan art of recognizable characters can help build a portfolio and following on social media which is a goal of mine this year.

Below you can see the image in its pencil stage.

I plan on doing more New Mutants illustrations in the weeks to come. It's fun! It'll also be timely (assuming the movie actually does get released!) for that social media exposure.

I'd originally planned to do this illustration of Magik "traditionally," but ended up sticking with the digital tools that I've grown to love, namely an iPad Pro and Clip Studio Paint software. I'd like to start building a bit of a side income from my artwork and have a lot to learn in that area. My thought was to practice for doing hand drawn "one off" commissions, but that might not be a route I travel in the end. I need to assess the market for digital commissions & prints, and certainly need to begin looking into business clients for spot illustrations, small independent comic assignments and the like. I've also begun to look into the crypto art world of non fungible tokens. Comic artists have long made a solid part of their income from selling their original art work following its publication. Artists who have moved to digital production don't have this revenue stream. I'm interested in seeing if that could be "re-created" in the NFT space and think it would be neat to be one of the earliest comic book artists to do so and experiment on a new frontier.

Sigh... All thoughts to expand on in future posts... My desire to post a quick image before bed has turned into quite a ramble and I've gotta wrap it up! But before I go... here's a compilation of all the New Mutants trailers released to date if you're intrigued and haven't seen them yet... or if you're as excited as I am and want to give them a rewatch!