Old Valkyrie commission

I mean the drawing is old.  Valkyrie is very young.  From 2004?

Rough sketches for an old Defenders commission

Looks like this one was done in 2003. I couldn't find a scan of the pencils so I'm showing three stages of layouts along with the final inks. It might seem like a lot of preliminary work but sometimes it takes me several revisions to get everything worked out and it's always better to make those mistakes in the sketching stage than it is when you're doing the finished art.

Defenders 128: A second shot at the cover art

I always liked the lighting and layout for this one (editor Carl Potts did the sketch) but hated the way I inked it. At the time, I was fumbling around, looking for a "style". I even tried imitating the loose pen and ink approach of an Iowa artist named Gary Kelley.

So I was very happy a couple of years ago when I was asked to recreate the piece for a collector. If nothing else, it shows that I've learned to ink a little better in the intervening years.