Undead X-men : Step 1 - thumbnails

I haven't really done any creative drawing for a good while, that's because I'm quite content putting my creativity in my dayjob (I can't really call it a job, I call it free education). I've been using my off time to study and develop some fundamentals (drawing the figure mostly). But it's also fun to put your skills into practice once and a while.

So I've joined a forum for amateur comic artists that hold monthly drawing challenges called penciljack. I used to participate in those, and I think most of my "illustrations" have been done for those monthlies. They have a league set up so you go up against another artist and the community votes on the "winning" piece. As you get more wins you move up in the league. Sounds fun? Well, feel free to join in! The forum is over here.

Anyway, I normally just draw whatever first comes out of my head, but I decided to take a more professional approach and really try to push myself and who knows create something I can be proud of :P

I had to pick the theme so I picked Undead X-men. I actually had the idea that there is a mutant with the ability to summon dead people. But doing this drains his own life force. He himself is very weak, so he summons dead X-men to fight for whatever he'd need fighting for. I think this could be a neat idea for a one off issue of X-men. Who knows, maybe I give it a go at some stage.

Anyway I did a couple of thumbnails but I really liked the first one the most, I also liked the warped perspective in the one below that, but not only would that be hard to draw, we wouldn't see their faces..which I think is quite important to engage an audience. So I decided to merge the two ideas together. It's really like they are looking down into the ground, maybe another mutant that has just awakened.