Ugh, TMNT is falling behind schedule so I volunteered to draw a few pages in issue #128 to help the artist out and lighten some of the workload, so I gotta focus on that this week instead of Shadoweyes. -__-
In the meantime, here is some older Shadoweyes art that some of you have probably seen already but a lot of you maybe haven’t!
Here’s a piece from 2018 that I really like. It was drawn after a period of not drawing any Shadoweyes stuff, so it was a lot of fun to getting back to Scout and Kyisha. I like this one because it feels like an evergreen Shadoweyes picture, like it sort of encapsulates the characters and the city in one image. ↓
↑ This one is from 2016, I believe, and it was during a time when I’d planned on Scout remaining in her shadowform while raising the Shadowbabies. This version of her was a design I was going to use in Shadoweyes For Good but ended up abandoning; I wanted her to have an “upgraded” form when she comes out of her cocoon, with more streamlined black markings and more animal-like digitigrade-type legs/feet. I did a lot of artwork with this design but when I finally resumed work on the new book, I felt like it was confusing so I dropped it and kept Scout’s design more like the original.
↓ Here’s another pic with the abandoned design, you can see it a bit better here. The book Scout is reading to the babies is Mrs. Pig’s Bulk Buy by Mary Rayner, which was one of my absolute favorite children’s book when I was a kid and features a hilarious illustration of a pig kicking a sandwich into the air.
↓ Okay this one requires a bit of context. My friend Erin and I used to have a sprawling, convoluted role-playing story that combined my Shadoweyes characters and characters from her own comic. It started off simple enough but over the years we added new characters and ended up creating an entire family of shadows. This pic here is almost all of them (we added a few more after this was drawn!), featuring Scout’s dad Crescent (the big one reading the newspaper), the grown-up shadowbabies (Pancake and Nightwhisper), Scout’s sister Dusk (the purple one on the right), and new shadowbabies Star, Moonbeam, Rosie, and Gem (plus their pet moo [a genetically-engineered food animal from the Shadoweyes comic] Toast and Grim Sorrow, Scout and Kyisha’s kitty from the comic). Whew!
↑ Here’s a pic of Scout as a baby with younger Max! I wanted to do a prequel comic at one point detailing Max’s life in the wasteland while she was in a post-apocalyptic biker gang with Scout’s dad Crescent, before she fled to the city. Maybe one day I’ll get back to it.
↓ In an early version of the story, Scout’s family Crescent and Dusk were going to make the leap from our RP and into the comic. At first, Crescent was going to be a villain, he was going to show up in the city while hunting down Max for stealing his bike and for stealing infant Scout from him. Eventually I decided to make him more sympathetic and wrote a scene where he and Dusk rescue Scout from the wasteland laboratory, and Scout would eventually learn more about her secret family, learn that Crescent and Dusk also both have shadowforms, etc. Ultimately I scrapped all that, though, it felt too complicated and distracted from the central Scout/Kyisha dynamic I wanted to focus on.
↓ I still love Crescent and Dusk though, maybe they could appear in another Shadoweyes book down the road.
Thank you so much for sharing all this extra Shadoweyes art content with us, these bonus pictures look really amazing! :) Also, IMO, it's great to hear that you're drawing some more TMNT for that upcoming issue, and I think I saw somewhere online that you're also drawing the variant cover for #127, is that correct?
Love the background! Out of all the pics you posted, I like the top and bottom ones the most. Plus, I'll 2nd some of the prev comments about books on the shadoweyes family.
Have you ever considered a lengthy story book with just a few illustrations? Why? I like all the background material you write - makes me want to see someday a novel or novelette (sp?) involving these characters.