Jay asked me if I’d be willing to ink a Catwoman drawing he’d done intended for the Pittsburgh Comicon’s Make-a-Wish Foundation charity auction. Jay is known for his gorgeous tonal drawings of the fairer sex and he has been recently acclimating himself to the world of comic book illustration and sequentials. I’d never worked with Jay before so this interested me and I always give to the PCC charity so I was a go. Even though he used model Mindy Zimmer for the pose, I told Jay that I felt I would need to tweek some of the drawing and proceeded with enhancing the anatomy and elaborating on the textures and lighting. The only thing I wasn’t too keen on but kept because Jay was good about it was the background cloudline being low on the left and high on the right. I would’ve lowered it on the right and added a thin white halo on top of the domed roof of the building and made Batman’s silhouette white. I also dislike, as many who read my gallery know, the Blue Line Art 2-ply board which is soft and absorbs the ink like a sponge and it’s hard to erase the pencil lines after inks are done and it’s a good thing I didn’t need to use my Hunt 102 quill as it would’ve bled on the surface like a stuck pig. On this 11X17 art I used my Raphael Kolinsky 8404 size 3 brush, Pitt brush marker, Sakura micronmarkers and Pitt S marker, drybrush, white finger smudges for the smoke, and white paint on a sponge for the fur texture. My only second Catwoman job (the first one was with my finishes over Terry Dodsen’s convention sketch over two years ago) the inks were completed on October 8, 2010. Jay informed me that he’d have have a digital color artist work on it and send me the file and we’ll probably sell the color art as a print at PCC and other shows.

UPDATE:On November 2 Jay sent me a file from color artist Andrew Harmon. After some discussion, we made requests for Andrew to make in the work and on December 2 he offered the final color file that will be used on the Pittsburgh Program book and as prints at the show.

Jay E. Fife Illustration: http://www.jayfife.com/
Andrew Harmon on DeviantArt: http://charactersink.deviantart.com/