This week’s Illustration Friday theme was stay. After floundering for a bit, I turned to my newest method for figuring out the subject matter – deciding what I wanted to draw, then making it fit into the theme. I’m also including some of my sketches and process this time, ’cause it’s been a while.
Instead of going with stay as a verb, I used the object-specifically the stays of a corset. After doing a little research (whoo fetish sites), I came up with the following sketch:
I scanned this and used my tablet to ‘ink’ over it. Normally I do this by hand with a lightbox before scanning the final art and coloring it digitally, but I’ve been working on improving my tablet skills, so this one was all digital. Here’s an in process shot that shows my sketch underneath the digital work:
Since I wanted to suggest a story, not just have a figure in front of a solid tone, I looked through some old pulp covers and came up with the rest of the composition.
I’m still playing around with the old-school comic palette I keep mentioning. Originally I had one tone throughout with limited accents of red and green, but I finally had to switch to the blue background to get my lovely girl to pop:
Feel free to leave some feedback in the comments, and more updates soon!






Hey Sarah…I love this…just saw the post on FB…are you in Chicago yet? Thanks for working with Susie and Jeff…they are very happy with your help. Stay cool…as you are:)
J.
Lovely illustration, its great to see the different stages of the final piece.