Studying other artists and drawing their characters

As initially I was intending to do a comic for my final piece, I decided to focus on various comics and comic artists. Although I changed my direction by deciding to do concept art for my final piece instead, copying and emulating these characters and styles helped refine both the characters and styles I would use throughout the course of the rest of the unit, as well as the actual final piece itself. 

Here are a couple of pencil drawings of Maid from the Tom and Jerry comic.  She was very easy to draw, apart from those hideous legs and those crazy bread-roll feet (as you may be able to see from the rubber marks and sketchy lines that remain on my drawing). What is it with these cartoonists and having feet that look like bread rolls??

Study of Hägar the Horrible by Dik Browne


Here is a pencil drawing I did of Hägar the Horrible, his son, and a cow that appears in one of his comics.  I really enjoy Dik Browne's style, although I found it strange and even a little challenging at times to draw in it because of how few and choice lines are used to construct his characters. 

Here are the Hägar the Horrible comics that I referenced.

Dik Browne's style is simple but effective, and has the ability to utilise only a small amount of strokes to create appealing, larger-than-life characters.  He uses round curves and shapes which make the characters appear spongey, and uses open-ended lines for details such as hair.  He tends to render textures with hatching, a deceptively simple-looking technique that can actually sometimes be quite time-consuming to create, particularly when applied to more spacious areas of a drawing. The variety of colour Browne uses throughout the strip is minimal and sparing, giving the strip a recurring colour scheme; the use of dull greens, browns and burgundies, with splashes of yellow and blue for background colours; while this may be seen as dull or even simply as colour printing limitations of the 1970s and 80s, it arguably helps enforce the coarse and natural atmosphere of a Viking-era setting, as well as keeping the overall look of the comic consistent.

With these observations in mind, I attempted to create my own character in the style of Dik Browne as if it were a character from Hägar the Horrible. After quickly researching Viking names, I decided to choose the name Bolverk, as it sounded like it would suit the kind of character I wanted to create, and chose the alliterative "Brutal" as his designated Viking-esque adjective. 

Work-in-progress photo:

Here is the finished drawing of Bolverk the Brutal: