First: I’ve only read the beginning of Y. I know, I know, blasphemy.

Second: Some people (Augie  of CBR fame and Ron from iFanboy) are geeky about lettering, I on the other hand am geeky about photo reference (and lettering…among other things). I love seeing how an image comes from another…sue me (not really).

Ok, that said, Y the Last Man is J.G. Jones. Why (or Y), you might ask, would I say that? Well, as those of you in the know, may or may not know, Jones was the original cover artist for Y (the last man). During his time as such, J.G. cast himself as his model for Y. Something I’ve enjoyed about J.G.’s work, since reading his 52 cover blog (that Wizard criminally no longer has up on their website) is himself. Any time I can pick out his face somewhere in an image he’s created, it’s a fun easter egg for me to discover.   And due to this, in my mind, Yorick from “Y the Last Man” has always been JG.

Secondly, JG Jones has one of the greatest heads, in the history of headkind. Seriously. Both times that I’ve seen him speak at con panels, I’ve been fasinated by the structure of his face (and no doubt, this fuels my joy in finding him, in his own work). Which in retrospect is a pretty creepy thing to say, but it’s the truth!

So when I decided to go about making a Y sketch, I decided (that’s right, I used ”decided” twice make that three times, in one sentence…) that if I was going to draw Yorick I was going to have to draw J.G. Jones. And so this sketch came to be.

This is not finished. It’s the underpainting for Yorick, and the rough pencils for Ampersand.

Got back yestereve. I’ve been compiling/organizing all my refernce images into a singular massive archive, and in doing so I relized that it would be good to have some reference for how characters look (think of it like a bastard-style sheet, to capture what I feel is the essential energy along with costume of a character) in case I needed to ever double check things. Well, as I was looking through the electro-inter-net for images of various characters, I suddenly had the realization that Mitchell Hundred somehow reminds me of Adrian Pasdar (of “Profit” fame)…..I have no idea why, since they don’t really look all that similar. But I thought it would be interesting to sketch what Pasdar as Hundred might look like. But seeing as it’s really way too late for me to work correctly, I didn’t get to finish the sketch….

So consider this a sketch-in-progress.