Simon Bisley Lobo study · Slinging Ink Skool

Simon Bisley Lobo study

I love Simon Bisley’s work, huge fan of his over-the-top style in early ’90s Lobo comics. I’ve found that a great way to learn the subtleties of a particular artist is to take a piece of his work and recreate it.

I used an iPad with a decent-resolution image of that particular comic book page and just eyeballed it, basically blowing it up on an 11×17-inch page. All my tools are in that photo: Microns, Tombows, a budget Dollar Store fat marker, etc.

I was drawing this slowly and methodically, totally unlike Bisley’s (probably) drunken, chaotic fugue state. Got a lot of value here, especially from the chaotic inking line work… like how to make a mess and still make it look good. Kept faithful to the original for about 90% of it, but I did some mods here and there (like the chains on his arm, I used a Ryan Benjamin technique for faking chains; sorta botched it up... but hey that's art).

However, the biggest lesson I learned from this exercise is… OMG do I hate drawing chains!!

(Funny cuz my previous study was a Todd McFarlane cover of Spider-Man with a lot of his spaghetti webbing… and man, it was grueling to draw that too, but also kinda fun)

So yeah, I won’t be creating any of my characters with chains.

No way, man.

(Btw, the original artwork has Lobo with one foot missing too. I was tempted to fix this, but I thought it’d be fun to leave that in.)

Full gallery of images plus references on my Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/visionarystorytelling/

11 comments