08 - Darna

I was surfing the net a couple of days ago and stumbled upon the blog by Gilbert Monsanto. Apparently, he's reimagining some of the classic Pinoy "Komiks" characters. He posted several images of the newly designed superheroes and villains that I have known while growing up.

I was also reading an old interview of Eric Canete, one of my favorite artists, in CBR. Eric is a Filipino who's now based in California. I am really drawn to his dynamic style and image composition. The thing that struck me in his interview was the advice that he got from Dave Johnson, another great artist, (I'm paraphrasing it) that "borrowing/copying" is not a bad thing and that the best thing to do is to take that what you "borrowed" and make it better so that you come up with something that you can call your own.

It is encouraging to hear these kind of words since as I've mentioned in my previous posts that I'm at that stage of learning and searching for my own style. I feel that most of my current works are shameless imitations of these great ones. Because of that I came up with this image of Darna in my futile attempt to give her a "Canete" look and feel.