DAVE SIMONS OFFICIAL WEB-SITE

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Any artist worth their weight will always advise the importance of sketching and creating preliminary work. There's several reasons for this - creating preliminary pieces generally means that any problems with design and line weight are ironed out before committing to the final art. Sketching also serves a multitude of purposes, not the least being the importance of just practicing drawing as a craft. Preliminaries can often be far more interesting than the final product. All too frequently they contain a certain speed and violence, a sense of immediacy that can often be absent in the final, polished, drawing. On this page we present pages from Dave's sketch book along with a handful of preliminary artwork for both commissions and finished comic book pages.

"Jade was a cat I had," recalls Dave. "I wanted to capture her high-strung attitude."

"Desmo Duck is an Italian duck who rides a Ducati motorcycle."

"Captain Dammit, is, of course, a satire of Captain Planet," says Dave. "I did it when I was doing storyboards for the show."

Two Hawkeye sketches, done as preliminary for a final commission.

Nick Fury, a warm-up sketch.

Daredevil. This is a small preliminary sketch for a full sized commission. Here you can see that the sketch is used in order to obtain the correct perspective and character placement.

Gothloli. Back cover for Dark Corridor magazine. This is the initital sketch that Dave produced. If you study this sketch against the final piece you'll quickly notice a series of differences between the two images. You can see the final result here.

Bloodrayne. Another preliminary sketch design for a commission. Again, comparing the two different images shows a number of slight variations. You can find the finished product here.

A.C.T.O.R. Presents: The Incredible Hulk. These five pages offer a rare insight into the process of creating a comic book. Here Dave has outlined each page with rough panel placement, created the art and decided what should go where. From there he has left notes in the margins which will aid both himself and the ink artist (Armando Gill) when the pages are transfered to the final art. Preliminaries such as these are often faxed to the editor and/or writer of the story so that any cosmetic changes can be made, and any problems ironed out before pencils proper are applied. It's not unsual for an entire issue to be produced in preliminary form, complete with several alternate pages and covers.