The saloon has always been a staple of the Western. In fact, some even consider the year 1920 to be the true end of the Old West; that year marked Prohibition going into effect. As all sales of alcohol were banned, this effectively closed down the saloons.
This was drawn from photo reference. I based this on a photo I snapped while visiting the Frontier Village out in Jamestown, North Dakota.
I studied a few photos online of dresses women wore in the Old West.
As noted in my comments in the above drawing, I’ll need to gather more references.
These were concept sketches for the characters in Poison Ivy Gulch. There’s no sense in doing this until I had some kind of characters to inhabit this world I created.
I made it a point to study comic strips in newspapers and book collections to get ideas for what these characters might look like. This is what I came up with.
Hats of all kinds, namely the iconic cowboy hat with its wide brim, is a staple of Westerns. Here, I wanted to draw various ones.
Cacti are plants almost always associated with the desert and especially with Westerns. Most commonly, you’ll see the tall Saguaro cactus with its twin arms.
Technically this isn’t realistic. The iconic Saguaro cactus is native to parts of Arizona, Mexico and California. Yet, you may see it just about any desert, even those not in North America. However we have to understand that cartooning is NOT meant to be realistic. It’s intended to be a shorthand. The presence of cacti is meant to signal to readers that this is a desert.
