Black Cat

Once again I find myself inspired by my computer wallpaper. That's one of the reasons why I like to use art for my wallpaper.

If I find myself in the trenches of an artist's slump, I'm rarely more than a quick glance behind my work for a last minute dose of inspiration.

This Tuesday edition of ninjaboy's sketch-a-day is inspired by a pretty damn cool illustration by Chris Bachalo. He is one of those funny book artists that I always come back to, and when I start pouring through his work again I realize that I never really left his books. He's worked on so many titles that I've been a fan of I doubt a year goes by that I don't read at least one book that he's illustrated.

However, I would say that the exact book that I fell in love with his illustrative styling was The Witching Hour. I remember seeing an add for the first issue in an issue of Wizard magazine while I was attending the Art Institute. My roommate and I usually walked down to our very local comic shop downtown every new comics day, and on this particular day I remember being excited as The Witching Hour number one came out. We got ready to walk to the comic shop, then I had to walk up to a print shop to pick up a project for school, and wouldn't you know it, it started pouring. Hard. And my roomie was such a pal that not only did he accompany me to the comics shop, but he also came along with me to the print shop on the other end of town.

The entire time we were both conflicted as we were excited about our new books in the thin plastic bags we had them in, but were also concerned at the amount of water coming down on those thin bags.

Needless to say, we got home looking like a couple of drown hippy rats (yeah, we both had long hair) and enjoyed our books.

Chris was really playing around with page layout in those books, and would take that experimentation even further in his next series Steampunk but I was hooked. His women were glamorous and beautiful, his male characters had weight and strength, and his compositions were fantastic.

Anyway, this illustration has nothing in common with any of this other than the fact that he has been doing some illustrations for Spiderman and I decided to sketch Black Cat, since he did a pretty cool version of her himself.

I hope you all get a kick out of it and I'll see you back here tomorrow.