Wonderful work

Excellent!

Looks quite different to the earlier versions. I like the pose and facial expression, but he has lost his "clumsiness". Since I do not know story or character, that might be a good thing, but I just loved that "huh, what the..." face on version 3.

Fascinating to see all the progress in your works, the influence editors have and what you make of it. Keep 'em coming, always hungry for background info also ;)

I also really liked that "HUH?" look on his face. I'll try to recreate it with this character and see how it goes. As for the character himself, he's not clumsy or incompetent, but he is young and I wanted to contrast that against the other characters in the story who are older and more in control of themselves. I'm hoping to use a little body language and some expressions to convey that. Also, since this is for a comic I wanted to sample more emotions than just the usual "serious pin-up" look we usually see in character studies.

Thanks again for the comments!

It's very well done, love it!

Thank you very much! I really appreciate you taking the time to comment.

Outstanding....

I'm coming in with no background on the character, or how he plays into the whole comic, so I can only comment on the image itself. But there is no doubt of the breadth of experience and mastery of the artist (you), even if, as you say above, you are thinking of changing his expression. As an image by itself, his expression seems right for what he's doing. You created a moment in the middle of a lunge, the kind of thing photographers work hard to get w/ athletic figures (that moment in a sport where the athlete is caught in a difficult move, but where the capture freezes him/her in time so well that it's as if everything in the sport led up to that one moment). Arton crosses the frame in a few places, just right to my eye; and your shading is, in most places, so perfectly graphic and comic-y, with a small number of flat planes of black, grays and white, laid out to give us all the movement, stress, strain and power of this lunge. I think the face fits his action, though as I say I don't know his background prior to this. I've looked at a number of your pieces, and it's always a pleasure to see the work of someone of mastery in their field, who knows how to work with editors, and who creates high quality work in the process. Very refined work.

Thank you for the thoughtful commentary. You definitely articulated on of the problems faced by comic book artists, and that is to capture a split second of action and still convey motion. One of the more difficult aspects of that is creating expressions that are convey the proper emotion without being repetitive. In other words, I don't want him snarling in every single panel.

For me, the problem with this particular face is that the cheek bones were not catching the shadows in a way that makes him easy to work with. By that, I mean that his face was okay, but technically hard to work with. So that's why I needed to go back to the drawing board with his design.

Thanks again for the kind comments.