Starting the Drawing Process - Reference and Research

When starting off my project, I wanted to gather a lot of research as well as develop my drawing skills. I made a list of things that I would need to improve on, this included figure drawing, location, perspective and lighting.

To start with, I looked into the fashion of the period, that way I could look at costume, hair styling as well as the human figure in general. 

Here are a few examples of my pencil sketches exploring hairstyles from the period:

I also gathered a lot of references of buildings from the period. Here are some examples:

As well as buildings I wanted to look at locations and because a good bit of the barnes story revolves around a cemetery I decided to do some research sketches of cemetarys as well as some research on grave markers and angels , these are some of the best images from that experiment

Looking to television and films for inspiration and research, I made a lot of drawings based on characters from series' such as "Ripper Street", working on my pen skills and figure drawing.

These are some examples of work from my sketchbook showing several figure drawings and clothing references:

One of my characters is based on the figure of "Spring Heeled Jack ", who was allegedly able to leap to great heights. Thinking about how I could take this information and illustrating my own take on it, I began to think about how I could take something like Free Running and incorporate this into the character, giving the effect of him leaping great distances. It proved to be a good research process, particularly for mid air poses.