Convention sketches are like a box of chocolates… you never know what you’re gonna get! 🙂 With my humble apologies to Forrest Gump, begins the tale of a convention sketch from last weekend at the Raleigh Comic Book Show.

Once I was settled in and had said my hellos to fellow guests and the show organizer, I decided to begin a convention sketch on a blank 7×10 comic backing board. Admittedly, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to draw when I began, but since I had drawn a Spider-Man last December I was at least not going to do that. So, pencil to paper and at some point I decided I wanted to draw Batman.

Had I decided to draw Batman sooner, it would have started out looking less like Orion from the New Gods! I realized I had a little bit of work to do to bring it back to being a Batman drawing and not Orion. Nothing against Orion, incidentally, and I probably should draw him too… but I was going for a more immediately recognizable character for this unsolicited sketch and I figured more people would recognize Batman.

I think I managed to save it… but you can be the judge!  Oh, and in case you wonder… I found myself without proper flesh-coloring markers so I improvised with a few different colors and going for the patchwork illusion of skin tone through color overload! It just didn’t look right leaving his face white once I had colored everything else. So, my least favorite part of this one is the faux flesh tone result here, even though the illusion works from a distance… it just doesn’t hold up quite as well to up-close scrutiny.

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