Fun With A Ruler: Super Simple Supes

I almost never have time to just draw for fun (I know, I hear you playing The World's Smallest Violin) so I sat down yesterday and messed around just for fun in my sketchbook. I've been looking at a lot of Shane Glines and Kyle Baker lately, and it amazes me how effectively they can break a character into simple shapes. They boil the character down to its core elements and lose all the extraneous details. I figured I'd try it with Superman, since he's so iconic to begin with, how hard could he be?

Taking a cue from his classic "S" logo inside a diamond type triangle, I thought I'd try to use only triangles or straight edges. I had to cheat a little bit, but it was a fun exercise and forced me to think in a different direction than I normally do. I inked almost all of the big shapes with a ruler. I'm a huge fan of the old Fleischer Superman cartoons so I used that costume, from his very first appearance in Action Comics. I even threw in the logo just or fun. It works well since it's triangular too.

You can see in my initial sketch I had to revise some things, most notably the legs by foreshortening them a lot more! Just a quick warm up exercise, but it forced me to draw and think off the beaten path and that's important. So remember to have fun and try something different!