While i'm on this Adams and Steranko kick, I wanted to share one of the most iconic images from that era, one that has gotten lost over the years as time has marched by. Steranko's Hulk cover was an astonishing design, with the integration of the logo into the artwork, and the fact that Hulk's head is really too large for his body. But it works, and it works beautifully since it allows the expression to be read better at this size, a triumph of getting the artwork to fit the message rather than be a slave to any one master (such as pre-designed proportions).
It isn't a wonder that Stan gave Jim all this freedom when it came to his work at Marvel, after all, he was looking at the stuff and knew that Steranko was on that enviable upward curve where the artwork experiences rapid leaps almost every month. What I don't get is how he didn't realize how Jim getting the writer credit and freedom to experiment would hurt Kirby. That lack of emapthy was a huge miscalculation at best, or a huge blind spot at worst. I suspect the latter.
Finished up a great piece tonight, inks over the Dave Dorman rough for a Crimson Empire cover. Oddly enough, the interior was drawn by Paul Gulacy, who I worked with many times. I should have been inking the interior on that one!
Posted this "in process" piece, simply to blow Alex Sheikman's mind, since we approach inking completely differently.
Not sure where this piece was used, but here are inks, in process, with Copic Markers for tones.
So I sit here, in my studio, with a drawing table equipped with a state of the art LED light board affixed, over a terabyte of memory available on the tower at my feet, a tabloid scanner capable of scanning at 1200 dpi in 24 bit color and downloading into Adobe's Photoshop CS suite, shown on a HD flat screen monitor and manipulated by a Intuos 3 pressure sensitive tablet... and i'm creating a personalized Haggadah for tomorrow night's seder using a photocopier, an X-acto knife and roll of scotch tape. And i'm then going to photocopy the whole thing, en mass, for over 30 people.
A new commission piece, and an interesting one to interpret, since i have no idea if the pencils that i was working off of were going to be inked, or were the basis for a painted piece. It meant that the values of the piece could have been changed significantly by having Dave separate the planes on the art by color, as opposed to line weight. I went in and did... well, what looked right to my eye, that's what. I've never drawn the Alien, even though I've seen it a million times in my nightmares.
