Character Development Special: Schwartz

Meet Schwartz, the unprepossessing! Schwartz is Saralactra's chief minion, (and probably the only minion who could actually be called a minion...) An occult engineer aided by a team composed of his seven sons (none of whom take after him, thank goodness,) Schwartz is utterly devoted to Saralactra and may be the only person at present who really believes in her and her plans. The rest of the team is strictly in it for the pay. You could say Schwartz is Saralactra's Igor. (Schwartz and his infamous flyer first come to the fore in The Wayward Queen around page thirty-two...)

Schwartz has been Saralactra's minion/assistant ever since the early rambling story that preceded The Wayward Queen. Frankly, he hasn't changed much either in appearance, personality, or role. When Sara got hijacked into the Wayward Queen story, Schwartz tagged along. But of course some details needed to be hammered out, especially in the design of his flyer... Here's some of the doodles I went through to figure out exactly what Schwartz and his flyer should look like in the Wayward Queen.

Sketchy Sunday: Samurai Sword Soul Goofiness

Doodles from a performance by the exceedingly silly improv troupe "Samurai Sword Soul" at one of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Sakura Matsuri events... I have no idea what this guy thinks he's doing. General cavorting, soon cut off by a sword-wielding samurai, by the looks of it.

Figure Friday: Casual Nudes

A batch of casual nudes from my life drawing archives, these are from an old life drawing session at the Society of Illustrators...

Figure Friday: Head Study

Yes, it's a head! Technically meant as a study for this painting to figure out the lighting on the face, but drawing faces is fun so I got a bit carried away...

(Trying to get back on some sort of blog schedule here, but with my current workload, I make no guarantees...)

Character Development Special: Saralactra

Behold the Dastardly Saralactra! The scheming mastermind behind all the chaos in the next hundred pages of The Wayward Queen! Occult Engineer Extraordinaire and unscrupulous meddler in Things Unknown! Her ambition knows no bounds, nor does her bossiness. She takes herself far too seriously, and aims to make everyone else do so as well. (The dress is her own design, to be worn when scheming and bossing.)

Saralactra technically goes way waaay waaaaaay back. I think her first iteration was when I was ten or eleven years old, and she acted as mega-villain in some half-baked story I was writing (the only thing I remember about it was that it was pretty much a rip-off of Lord of the Rings, but with a female cast. Yeah, don't ask.) Unfortunately I don't think I ever drew her back then.

Anyway, Saralactra lurked in the back of my mind for years until I started knocking around another story in College, the one which eventually led to the Wayward Queen. At this point Sara resurfaced as a villain once more. This time she was considerably less mega, being technically a student witch in the Abracadabra University of Magic, with a secret hobby of Taking Over the World. Eventually she gathered a bunch of ragtag troops in the chaotic land of Oblivion and invaded the realm of Queen Gwenevere. (I do not recall how she got the troops or the money to pay them.) (Yes, that story had a few plot holes...)

Here's a few remnants from that phase of Saralactra's existence... The dramatic pose is Sara as she sees herself; in actuality, she looked more like the picture seen here on her student ID tag. The two comic pages were from a brief attempt to turn that story into a comic... BONUS: these pages feature a really early Erroneous! (And some bizarre horses... Or mutant horse-camel things. Or something. OOOOH man, horse anatomy, I HAD NO CLUE.)

Later still, when I started planning the Wayward Queen, Saralactra resurfaced yet again to harass the rest of the cast. She is no longer a student (the Abracadabra U. angle was ditched after Harry Potter came along to dominate the whole magical school premise.) She IS still pursuing her secret plans on the side of whatever she's supposed to be doing. (At one point she was going to be someone's maid, but that didn't stick.) Rather than being a witch, she is now an occult engineer, and good at it; and, while not nearly as powerful or important as she'd like to be, is currently in a position to command a certain amount of funding for her plans (how she gets the funds is another whole story...) Is she a villain? Or just an over-ambitious meddling nuisance? You make the call!

Here's some of the doodles and sketches that came about during the development of Saralactra Phase Three, all done around 2005 - 2006: