Aucoin, Derec - Warbird!

I met Derec at the Houston Lone Star Show back in the early part of 2003. I've admired his work since his days on Quicksilver, so I was looking forward to getting a commission from him. I was hoping for a drawing of Crystal from the Inhumans (harkening back to her appearances in Quicksilver), but I foolishly didn't bring any reference with me and it'd been quite a while since he'd drawn her. After a futile and frustrating run through the dealer's room in which I was only able to find one measly QS comic (and I didn't want to shell out big bucks for a FF backissue), I decided to have him draw Warbird who happened to appear in the issue I was able to find. And this drawing frustrated him to no end. After he looked through my Profolio and saw that the majority of my sketches were pretty cheesecakish, he wanted to do something that would "fit" with the overall content of the book. Took ages to settle on a pose he liked. He got started on a pose that was gorgeous and I was quite happy with - then he realized he had her body too far to one end of the page and she'd be missing an arm. So he erased everything and started over. And wasn't able to recapture that magic, so he came up with another pose, which vexed him considerably. I had seen him cranking out Superman sketches in literally minutes, but this one Warbird piece took him about 4 hours - he was getting so frustrated with how much trouble she was giving him. Luckily for us all, he's a lot of fun to hang around, very funny and nice, so at least it didn't *feel* like 4 hours. I think she was well worth the wait! These beautiful fruits of his labors are done in pencil and marker on 11x17 Bristol.