The other day I got an email from a friend asking if I could do “finishes” on a couple of pin-ups he penciled. Now, for those of you who haven’t heard the term finishes (since it is one they don’t really use in comics nowadays), doing finishes means the penciler is giving you a decent amount of information but they expect you to do some of the heavy lifting too. Now, with “regular” inking you are expected to add a certain amount of yourself to the pages, but there’s a limit with how much you can add before it becomes more your job than the pencilers. Kevin Nowlan is a great example of someone doing finishes, cause no matter whose pencils he works over (with the exception of Mike Minola) when the pages are done it is definitely a Kevin Nowlan job!
For these pieces my friend told me he wanted a combination of his style and my own, and told me to go buck wild on it to get there, so you can see I’ve made a decent amount of adjustments to find the happy middle between his style and mine. It comes through mostly in the faces where I tend to do more referencing than he does, but his figures have a bit more life in them which I struggle to get across.
So, here are a side by side comparison of the pencils by Larry Jarrell, and the finishes I did over them.
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