Over and over and over...

Not to give anything away, but there's a specific scene in The Big Black that involves a naked woman on top of a building. I first did some more realistic sketches to get the anatomy basics for the angle/pose I wanted in the panel-to-be, then fooled around with it using various styles and stuff, going towards different levels of graphic abstraction.

I kind of go nuts with repetition sometimes when it comes to trying out different twists on an image I've got in my head. It helps you discover things that most likely wouldn't come to you early on (like the similarity between the back of a woman's body and a plume of smoke). There's at least a dozen different riffs on this idea in my sketchbook, but here's a few select examples:




P.S. You'd never be able to tell, but a Picasso painting influenced the composition of this panel (which will eventually look fairly different from these when actually drawn into the story). I can't find a good enough scan of it online, but the painting in question is called "Still-life with Steer Skull".