All my favorite pages of HABIBI are too spoiler-ish to share,
so instead here’s a fairly innocuous/boring page that can be broken down into various stages of development.
It’s outright shameful the lapse of time from the first draft free-form journaled in my sketchbook in October 2004 and the final inks
laid down a couple of days ago. But here you go — 1) sketchbook rough in ballpoint pen… 2) composed into pages in the thumbnail draft…

… 3) the earliest stage of penciling … 4) note how I flipped the first two panels to flow better …

5) final inks. This is page 298. And today I finished page 302. Thank you for waiting!

PS — for those of you interested in production details, check my old tool talk posting.

Quick follow-up to that last entry. Peter asked how big the sketchbook pages are. They’re 9″ x 12″.
Here’s another sketch with today’s page of HABIBI laid behind it. The HABIBI pages are drawn within
an 8.75″ x 12.5″ live area, but you can see how detailed they are compared to the sketchbook.

Because the sketches are drawn from life with plenty of space on the page, it’s easy to dash them off with pocketbrush.
But the comics compositions are ridiculously worked over - generating heaps of eraser shavings. And they’re inked with
these sable watercolor brushes (I’ve graduated to the Winsor Newton series seven!)
(That’s my hand posing to give a sense of the page size.)

Anyways, this HABIBI page was drawn today. And the sketch above is of my friend Kathleen at Benoît Peeter’s apartment in Paris.

There’s dozens and dozens of figure drawing sketchbooks on my shelves, so I’d thought I’d occasionally post a drawing. Almost all of them are executed with those Pentel pocketbrush pens straight to paper with no pencils or erasers or fussing like my comics pages. And the subjects are admittedly almost always pretty girls/women. Occasionally I also draw trees. Here’s a couple drawings - one of Gabrielle and one of Miriam.