Inkwell Awards volunteer, my neighbor and good pal Joe Goulart enters the Bob Almond Inkwell Gallery for the first time with his request for me to ink some covers for him to raise funds for the Disabled American Veterans charity. In this case he got two donations from another buddy and up until recently my neighbor artist Roger Andrews in which he did simple blue pencil layouts for of Captain America and Ghost Rider on variant blank cover editions of their respective titles. You can tell that they sat around as they’re signed 2011…I had to prioritize paying jobs over them and Joe understands that…in fact, I still have two more covers with Frankie B. Washington pencil art to do down the road for Joe.

Roger has done cover donations for my Inkwell Awards organization before as well as a recent Ms. Inkwell piece that I finished and posted here recently for the upcoming Ms. Inkwell Gallery book. These are my 2nd and 3rd efforts with him. He tends to draw in an animated style reminiscent of Marvel’s Super-hero Squad. So my job was to finish the work in ink, elaborating and enhancing where I could but not contradicting the style and intent of Roger’s vision….it can be a fine line with mixed results.

The Captain America was simpler but I found myself happier with it. I didn’t have templates for the circles on the shield that size and couldn’t use a compass easily on the edge of the cover like it was, so I had to use french curves (which is never fun). I used mostly brush with some Pitt brush marker and micronmarkers, drybrush, some greywash for the background smoke, and gradated dot zip for the shield. I thought Captain America had been better represented in my gallery but apparently I’d only previously inked him three times alone or with someone else, twice with an Avengers team, once as Isaiah Bradley, and a floating head shot on that infamous Black Panther commission by me and Sal Velluto. If you count all of that, this, my eighth Cap, was completed on 9/7/12.

While the scan for the Cap layouts was hard to read, I altogether forgot to scan the Ghost Rider blue pencil layouts, but I think you can get the gist of what I started out with from the Cap one. For this one I wasn’t as pleased with it as the earlier cover. I approached it the same way with all of the same tools except no greywash, but instead using black and white ink finger smudges, a bit of drybrush again, and some white dot zip for what’s on the other side of the bike glass. I wrapped my second Ghost Rider job up 9/8/12.

Roger Andrews at Comic Art House: http://www.comicarthouse.com/andrews.html