Here's two drawings of U Go Girl -- a superheroine I drew for a commission. I had actually never heard of this character before, so the client even had to send me some reference, since I knew nothing about the comics she appeared in (even though they were created by the fabulously talented Mike Allred).
Anyway, because of my lack of any connection to the character, I had a bit of a tough time coming up with a drawing. I tried to think up an action pose but not knowing much about her made that difficult. I knew her super-power was teleportation, but what was that like? Did she just pop in and out of space? Did she disappear in a blue cloud and a "bamf!" sound effect? After a bit of thinking, I settled on trying to create a quiet drawing of her, in a contemplative mode (as had been shown in a couple of the reference samples). For what its worth, I'll outline a bit of my process in coming up with the final drawings below.
First, I did a quick colour thumbnail in marker, which I thought was alright, but pretty dull:
But the thumbnail did get me thinking about one of my favourite paintings, "the Voice" by Edvard Munch:
I've loved that painting since I was a teen -- the quiet serenity of that piece is so evocative to me. So, inspired by that memory, I sat down and did these two pencil sketches:
I couldn't decide which one I liked better, so I decided to ink and tone-up both of them and let the client pick which one he preferred. The client eventually went with the blue one on the left, so I still have the other one, and I'll probably keep it to sell at a convention or show some time in the future.
Incidentally, this isn't the first time I've been inspired by Edvard Munch's paintings. I often do subtle riffs on his work, as you can see in this previous post.