Peter Severinson an annotated gallery This is the place where I'm going to post a bunch of sketches and concept art that you might find interesting. I'm also going to include a few notes as I go along, give me a chance to show you where we're coming from visually and talk about the artsy stuff I'm into. Enjoy. The cover of our first print version - August 31, 2008 The cover. What more to say? The text is done with liquid chalk markers of all things. Who knew such things existed? The good people at Opus framing, that's who. They're gods among sales staff those people. Freddy and Heartbreaker pencils - May 3, 2008 I completely fail at updating this page. Ah well. I just got a note from a friend telling me that I've had my name spelled wrong at the top of the page really as long as this thing's been up. Which is embarassing considering that much of my living comes from copy editing. So when I fixed it, I figured, what the hell? Why not throw some more stuff up?   I think my first post on this thing was of Freddy, so I probably already described what I was going for with his fire. I could check, but I'd have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page. I've been doing more life drawing in the past couple months and I think it's really paying off, especially for drawing non-superhero-shaped superheros, which is definitely something we wanted for the book. And Heartbreaker. What a girl, eh? I've spent so much time getting that face how I want it, and I think this is actually one of my best yet. I had the misfortune of sketching her really well once, a long time ago. What followed was a furious couple weeks trying to recreate that one drawing that felt right. Agonizing. I've done more studying of native American faces in the last little while, and I think that comes through a bit in this one. Still such a long way to go. Face sketches - November 16, 2007 I made these sketches while I was on a plane going to my brother's wedding in Sweden this summer. With no pages to work on, I figured it would be a good time to get back to basics and face the never-ending ordeal of understanding faces - again. I was a few pages from chapter three at the time and figured I'd work on faces that might fit in the downtown eastside, which involved getting more comfortable with different ethnic features. But you can see that I was also doing some bigger facial expressions. I was working on a few different systems for how I was mapping out the faces and this was a good way to test them out. I spent some time at the big sculpture museum in Copenhagen on my trip. You could get right up close to these stunning renaissance scultures, right? This is the stuff where the science of doing realistic life art was all wrapped up in poetry and myth and spirituality, so we're dealing with this idealized, epic realism. Just fantastic study material. So I'd just walk around the pieces, really close, staring at the faces, watching what all the features did from different angles. Then I went back to the hostel, took out the sketchbook and drove myself insane. Trying to draw a face that works really shows me how little we understand of what we see. For something we study more than any other visual thing, it takes a hell of a lot of work to be able draw it. I can't ride the skytrain or watch a movie without part of my brain twisting and weeping in agony every time I see some feature or some shadow or some angle that doesn't fit in whatever kind of drawing model I have in my head. But yeah, check out the faces at the beginning of the book. Those were many strategies ago. Neighbourhood study - October 24, 2007 Going with an inflexible black-and-white style brings up a lot of design challenges, particularly with settings. This is an early attempt to do a dynamic, complex setting wihtout using any gradients. This is a handy drawing to keep around, just as a reminder of how I solved various issues. This was also part of determining what our heroes' neighbourhood looks like. This scene should look familiar to anyone who's walked around some of Vancouver's older residential areas. I've grunged it up a bit to suit the story. But rather than make up stuff, I really just brought the stuff I found behind the houses up front. For example, everyone having a different fense and the tone of electrical cables coming off the corners. You'll see all that stuff walking up and down the lanes behind the houses in Vancouver. I'm a huge fan of the mix of architecture you can still see around town. Especially the shiny, renoed houses right next to the 1960s shitholes. We live in a wacky economy. You won't see that kind of stuff in the book, though, that world's a bit more radically segregated. Looking at a scene like this makes me feel I need to do more environmental studies for other parts of the book. Character stuff is a bitch in that it's never perfect and it pulls your focus from less glamorous stuff. Bully study - October 19, 2007 I love and hate Bully. He's a fantastic character with a great look, but almost everything about him is hard to draw. I'm not going to post the really early drafts of Bully; they're painful. The superhero strong man is really an overused icon, so creating Bully was a big challenge. The idea for him is this: instead of a huge, muscle-bound guy based on an above-average human frame, why not try to squeeze the same amount of mass on a normal human frame? When I draw Bully, I sketch him out just like a normal person, except for a bit more shoulder width. But his height, ribcage, pelvis, limb lengths and all the rest are the same as any other character. The goal is that you should be able to picture a normal-sized guy inside Bully every time you see him. Sounds like a simple plan but, man, it took a lot of tries. The result is something Savage really wanted to see in Bully, a normal guy rendered grotesque by his muscle mass. I think this drawing really gets at a sick, cancerous quality I'd like to get more of. I sometimes feel the drawings of Bully in the book are the best and worst art in there. It's so easy to screw up the proportions and then it just looks weird. But when this surreal body combines with a totally normal angry teenaged guy, I just love it. Freddy draft - October 17, 2007 This character draft of Freddy was really a critical drawing at the early stages of the game. At this point, the most we had going was savage's wild story arcs and character concepts. Great material for an artist to dig into. But it was this drawing that really made us think we could put something cool together. I was thinking of doing this non-gradiaded black-and-white, but I wanted to keep a lot of personality in my faces, make real individuals out of them. this draft convinced me it would work. You can see that, while the style has gotten much tighter, the characterizations of Freddy haven't really changed much. Savage's concept about Freddy was kind of rooted in the idea that firey superheroes are too damn safe, they never seem to cause scarry burning damage. With that in mind, I wanted Freddy to have a really dangerous-looking fire. Not the human torch's decorative propane burn but a barrel of crude oil lighting up. Thick black, acrid smoke, uneven flames, tons of stark lighting coming off it.