Superheroes are my favorite figures to draw and paint. I've done pictures of them all my life and only academia and intellectual shame can stop me from depicting them. You can tell a lot about a person by whether he or she likes superheroes or not. I did this tiny superhero portrait to entice a fan to buy it, since it showed her favorite character, "Black Bolt." "Black Bolt" was a Marvel character, the king of the land of the "Inhumans," where everyone was a freak. The royal family was especially freaky and all of them had superpowers and costumes. Black Bolt, as king, was the most powerful. He had control of vast electromagnetic and gravitic energies, which were regulated by a tuning fork that he wore on his crown.
The most characteristic thing about Black Bolt was that his voice had a hugely destructive power. Any time he spoke, things blew up. (I know some people like that...) If he spoke loudly, it was as if an atomic bomb went off. So he had to stay mute all the time, unless he needed to use his voice of doom as a weapon. Strangely enough, you never see Black Bolt using sign language or writing things down and showing them to people, he's always enigmatically silent. I liked him because he had one of the best costumes in the Marvel world, black with silver lightning bolts on it. In this tiny portrait, I used a leaping ballet dancer as model for him, rather than the massive figures of comic book conventionality.
"Black Bolt" is acrylic on Strathmore illustration board, 5" x 8", October 1982.
3 comments:
I never saw any of your superhero pics. I think this is very well done!
There's nothing wrong with drawing superheros and this illustration is beautiful! It certainly looks to me like something that could be published on a cover.
Thanks, Tristan and Rae, but this tiny portrait is light-years away from being worthy of a cover. Check out "CG Hub" for the kind of stuff which is being published these days. This is what I have to shoot for.
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