I Draw Comic Book Style Illustrations Based Off Of Cosplayer Photos

I got the idea at Portland’s 2018 Rose City Comic Con, where my friends and I stumbled upon an amazing Gambit and Jean Grey (X-Men characters) duo of cosplayers visiting from Seattle. My friends and I were so impressed that we all got photos. When I posted my RCCC photos to Instagram, a mutual friend of the woman dressed as Jean Grey and myself made sure to tag her in the photo. She in turn tagged the Gambit cosplayer, and he wrote me personally to see if I would send him the photos. I told him about how impressed I was with his cosplay, and asked if he would be alright with me doing a drawing of it. He not only was estatic to be asked that, but also shared photos of his friend who cosplays as Spider-Man, and I ended up drawing both of them. After posting them, the Spider-Man cosplayer mentioned that it was a good “edit” of the photo to which I replied, “Nope. Not an edit. I drew this freehand,” and proceeded to share in my Instagram Stories the Timelapse videos of the drawings from start to finish.

All the sudden I started getting followers. More followers than before and people asking me to draw them as well (a lot of Spider-Man cosplayers) to which I obliged. I’ve been drawing my whole life, and I’ve found that people are really happy when they get a drawing of themselves. So I did a bunch more drawings and then October hit.

The artist, Jake Parker, made up a challenge for himself called “Inktober” in which, for each day of October, he was tasked with drawing a new image. I partook in the challenge myself in 2016 and it definitely was intense, but I made it through the whole month! I had to skip 2017 because of two back-to-back art shows I was preparing for, but picked it back up in 2018 with more cosplayer drawings.

At first, I was writing the cosplayers on Instagram to ask for permission to draw their images. I figured it was fun to share some excitement with the cosplayers until one of them told me, “You know... you don’t need to ask. You should just do it,” and so I have been and there’s generally a fair amount of excitement still but now as a surprise present as opposed to something expected. Some of the cosplayers are very well known with tons and tons of followers and some don’t have even as many as I do, but i’m always looking for my favorite version of the character I want to draw, not how popular the cosplayer is.

It’s been a fun ride so far and I’ve done about 75 of the illustrations in the last 4 months with no plan of stopping. If you want to see more, as well as see the cosplayers tagged in each of the posts, and see all of the timelapse videos of them coming together AND take a screengrab of the final piece to use as phone lockscreen backgrounds, please feel free to join me on Instagram @thefuturesteve.

I’ve also gotten a good handful of commissions for these drawings as well, so don’t be afraid to ask!