Another member of Strong Arm Studios, Frankie & I were excited to collaborate on other work since our Death commission (on gallery page 1). Our first reunion effort was Superman with Lois Lane and, like with Death, I had many opportunities to play elements up in the inking stage and I wouldn’t prefer anything less. The only problem I had was that the bristol board that Frankie used was so soft and the surface was much worse than most boards I’ve worked on so it absorbed the ink laid upon it in large areas and the markers caused bleeding which meant more errors to clean up later. Besides brush and marker I used black spatter for the city scape fade-off effect behind the cloud wisps, white spatter for the stars and the white building on the right to blend it into the transition better and some 20% dot zip on Lois’ boots to help define her up against the rolling black folds. I then added zip to her top to balance her ensemble. This 11X14 job was completed on 11/15/03.

Catwoman is the follow-up 14X17 job w/ Frankie. I tweaked a few elements in the image, like perspective and tried to really play up on others. The challenge for me was keeping the Egyptian relic from competing with the dimensional space of Catwoman. A heavy contour line on her form wasn’t enough. Zip was the solution which pushed back the relic in the dark room. Along with my normal inking tools of zip, drybrush, razor scrapings, grainy china marker and some white paint spatter. It was completed 11/18/03. UPDATE: Strongarm Studios unfortunately closed shop in January 2004.