Character Development Special: The Red Witches

Time for another Character Development Special! Meet the Three Red Witches: Chic, classy, cunning, and possibly nefarious. They are first fully seen on page twenty-three of the Wayward Queen... (but they may be lurking on earlier pages.)

There are three sisters, all redheads, all witches, all flawlessly dressed. Minerva is the snooty one:

Athena is the nerdy one:

And Bellona's the ho:

The feathers do serve a purpose, which shall be seen later in the comic...

These ladies go back to the rambling make-it-up-as-you-go-along story that first spawned the Queen. Back then, they didn't have very defined personalities, but they did have red hair. (And really, if you have red hair and a black wardrobe, what else do you need, right?) Here's some of what I have from that incarnation:

Later, when I started developing the Wayward Queen sometime around 2005, I resurrected the Three Red Witches and added them to my cast of (more or less) villains. Of course if they were going to make the cut, they were going to need personalities. Here's a mess of doodles and sketches I made in the course of fleshing them out:

And here's the semi-official sketches I used as rough model sheets when drawing the first batch of comic pages:

Figure Friday: Wayward Queen Cover Limb Studies

Life studies of limbs for the series cover of my webcomic, "The Wayward Queen" - yep, this painting again. Partway through the painting I realized I needed more better reference of the arms and legs, these sketches were the result of my last-minute revised reference scramble... More studies for the same painting here.

Whatever Wednesday: Wayward Queen Promo Comic

What’s all this, then? Just a teensy promo comic to pimp out my webcomic, The Wayward Queen! Why? Because the first twenty pages are now up, and we’re about to move out of the intro bit and into the real adventure! LOOK OUT! The Wayward Queen can be read on www.queengwenevere.com/wayward-queen! Updates are every Monday and Thursday (more or less, okay, sometimes they lapse into Tuesday or Friday morning… But it IS twice a week, regular or irregular!)

Figure Friday: Wayward Queen Cover Rough Studies

A couple of rough life studies for the series cover for my webcomic, "The Wayward Queen" - this painting here. The pose I wanted for the final painting turned out to be technically impossible - The full figure study here was a fast sketch of the closest pose that could be managed without having a contortionist handy. In the end I ended up doing studies of various parts of the pose and kind of glomming them together (hey, if Ingres could get away with it, why not me?) I did a number of more finished studies of hands and legs and other bits, some of which you can see here.

Whatever Wednesday: Deer

All right, I guess we're more or less back to our regular blog schedule after the holidays (I can never keep on top of these things during the holidays...) How about a few deer! These guys were rooting around for acorns and I was halfway behind a rock pretending to be a tree and watching them, they didn't notice me for quite a while... (More sketches of the same group of deer were posted back here.)