Risk & Subway Bassist

These sketches are from a few days ago.

I tend to rush through my drawings and clearly the only one that looks even remotely polished is the lower left one with the "Risk is serious bizness" caption. It's a self-portrait. I'm a terrific geek.

The others are in various states of undress, as it were.

As a little kid, I would just straight-up draw characters and scenes out of nothing, using my ever-trusty ballpoint pen. This was very impressive, but ultimately limiting. Why? Because while all the detail I would put in was very nice, I'd have all the figures arranged in boring poses with stock expressions that I'd have drawn a million times before. I'm trying to get away from that.

The guy on the first page, top right, is a good example of my first approach. I was aiming to draw a funny little old timey fat guy, but I got so caught up with other details that he was left with a very bland slouch. Maybe he's just chilling. Maybe he's stoned. Yick.

Second page, top, I was posing a skeleton and wound up with a much more expressive figure. Now, hardly either of those drawings are polished or complete, but I think the girl in the panels is more successful. She's not as detailed, but I think the fat guy needs more cleaning and messing around with, whereas stick-girl just needs flesh and decent backgrounds.

Bottom right dude on the first page is in sort of an in-between state: he's expressing SOMETHING, but the scene needs a lot of cleaning up and some reposing. He's supposed to be a misanthropic jazz musician on a subway. Could you tell?