30 Minute (yeah right) Drawing- "Cloak and Dagger" by @SamaxAmen

It was supposed to be a 30 Minute Sketch, but I went overboard on this drawing of Cloak & Dagger that I did for Brian Cole...
I usually post these on my art blog, but I know a lot of GhettoManga readers love Cloak & Dagger just as much as I do, so I decided I'd drop this one over here first. So anyways, I know I went way past 30 minutes on this one. I would say this one was more like two hours. Brian specifically requested that I not draw Dagger overly sexual, which I'm sure is a problem with C & D fanart. But I think of Dagger more as an acrobatic warrior than a pole dancer. I think of her as being kind of an elfen ninja, similar to Longshot, or that blonde dude from Lord of the Rings.

I think most people pump up the sexual tension when drawing Cloak & Dagger due to the forbidden allure of interracial sex and dating, casting Dagger as the pure unattainable white chick to Cloak's pining brotha forever stuck in the friend-zone. I dunno... I grew up on a military base, where interracial relationships were the rule, not the exception. So I missed that one. I thought of the pair as a platonic couple that grew up together on the streets and have one another's backs. Like a brother and sister. Sexuality doesn't come into this one for me.


I tried to keep it simple with Dagger, but I really poured a lot of the drawing time into figuring out how I was gonna draw Cloak. There was a lot of drawing and redrawing until I was happy with the balance of form and flatness that makes the character cool visually. I think he is best portrayed as a good guy looking for an excuse to become the hooded phantasm that might envelope everyone into the folds of his cape, plunging them into the limitless, lightless hell within, maybe never to return. Dagger knows the nice guy that Cloak doesn't show to anyone else, and he knows the vulnerable young girl inside the butt-kicking whirlwind of glowing knives everyone else sees. As far as anyone else knows, Cloak & Dagger are just a couple of angry teenage vigilantes, bringing horror to bad guys on the streets they haunt. But the fact is that they are homeless kids, just trying to survive, with no one but each other to lean on.

So obviously I've been wanting to draw Cloak & Dagger for years... The moral of the story is if you request a drawing of a character I REALLY want to draw, you will get a lot more than you pay for, I guess (you can always throw some extra in my tip jar if you want)!

Anyways, If you want me to draw your fave character, you should CLICK HERE to join FAN ART FRIDAYS, the GhettoManga 30 Minute Sketch Club!

Peace,
-samax
Samax Amen draws people, places and things for fun and profit. He is the artist of many great comics you never heard of like Herman Heed, Champion of Children, The Brother and The World As You Know It. He even writes and draws his own comics, like Dare: The Adventures of Darius Davidson, Spontaneous, and Manchild when he gets around to it. Because making comics is hard and stuff, he started GhettoManga as a blog in 2006 and as a print magazine in 2008. 
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