Marvel Comics Characters

I very rarely do pictures of well-known media or comics characters. I usually depict original characters or personages from books. But here dredged from the distant past are some renderings of Marvel Comics characters from the "Avengers" with other Marvel guest stars. I was asked to do this as a fan magazine ("fanzine") cover by the legendary Pat Floss, whose narcissism I served on many an artistic occasion. She asked to be depicted as the "Black Widow," seated in the center with some sort of weapon, dressed in the shiny black catsuit she wore in the comics. The portrait, so to say, is flattering. The shiny fabric is known as "nylon cire'   " or waxed nylon and it was stretchy and reflective and very popular in fashion back in the late 60s, when Diana Rigg wore a similar jumpsuit on the British TV "Avengers."

By her sides are Marvel characters she had relationships with, on the left "Daredevil" and above him a non-superpowered gentleman whose name I've forgotten but who was her spy protector for a while. On the right is "Hawkeye" the super-archer who carried on with her at many occasions. The arrows through the heart is not my idea, it was Pat's, who was tickled that she had Marvel men fawning over her.

The "Wurf" dog character belongs to another Marvel title, "The Inhumans," who Ms. Pat was also fond of. The dog was a giant bulldog, the size of a small car, who could teleport people and things across space and different dimensions.

Pat disappeared from my life in the late '80s, before I made my move to the DC area, and I have not found any relevant information about her, nor have I tried to.

"Wurf" fanzine cover is ink on illustration board, 8" x 10", January 1983.

Inn on Poplar Hill illustrated map

I go to the Inn on Poplar Hill every August for vacation days. It is one of the sweetest places I've ever stayed at anywhere. The people are friendlier than family and the breakfast foods even entice me to come downstairs in the morning. It is also a great place as a base for winery expeditions.

The Inn has a lot of acreage consisting mostly of wide green lawns and forest trails. Along the way on these trails are little places you can stop and swing on a hammock or watch birds and frogs or even have a picnic by a fire pit. 

The owners have enjoyed my art for many years and some time ago they asked whether I could create an illustrated site plan for them, which they would print up as part of their brochures. This is to guide people who are wandering around in the woods but it would also be a souvenir of the Inn. I have finally finished this map and you see it above. 

They gave me a hand-drawn map to use as an example, pen lines over a printout from Google Maps. I can't guarantee a high degree of accuracy for this trail map, since the trails were not visible on the printout. I hope it will act at least as a suggestion on where to go on the estate. I have walked most of these trails and gotten lost many times.

The Inn itself is a farmhouse from the 1890s and the rooms are all decorated in sort-of-Victorian comfort. I drew a little picture of the house inside the circle to the left of center. 
Here is a close-up of it:

Last year they said they would grow some hops plants, brew their own beer, and serve it to guests in a newly built Beer Garden. I don't know whether they actually did this, but I put it in anyway. I'll be at the Inn next week and will find out.

Poplar Hill site plan is watercolor and gouache and ink on illustration board, 18" x 14 1/2", August 2015.

National Gallery Rotunda

Long before I moved to the DC area, I would travel down on the train to Washington to visit friends. While they were at work I wandered around the public areas of the city, seeing famous things. The National Gallery was an important destination and I took my sketchbook in there so I could draw its majestic architecture and even sketch a couple of paintings. This is a drawing of the Rotunda at the National Gallery, with its noble Ionic scroll column heads and its fountain with a bronze statue of the god Mercury. I sat for quite a while drawing this and no one bothered me.

Nowadays I live only a few miles from this museum and I hardly ever go there. Why, I wonder. Well, there are reasons. 32 years ago, when I did this drawing, the DC area was not as crowded as it is now, it was easier to either drive in or take the Metro which was rather new at that time. And there was not all this paranoia about terrorism which would probably prevent me from sitting at length in a public place doing a drawing. Nowadays I would have to pay a large garage fee (or dash about putting quarters in the meter) to drive in and park, or I'd have to walk a fairly long distance to a Metro station. There must be a way to revisit the Museum, with or without sketchbook. Maybe I can persuade some artsy friends to make it an expedition.

Black tech pen on sketchbook page (what else?), 6 " x 8 1/2", 1983.

In 1983 there was no public Internet, no cell phones, no consumer-available digital photography, and the World Trade Center towers in New York City were still standing.

Industrial Pattern 10: Chicken

My meeting with chickens at a winery has inspired me to see a fowl-ish creature emerging from the nest of iron straw at a steel mill. It lays eggs of glowing metal. I imagine it makes quite a noise as well! Fresh from the farm, the metallic chicken emerges from the industrial pattern.

Brown tech pen ink on sketchbook page, 4" x 3", August 10, 2015.

Cloud-Based Systems

I love the summer skies. I could sit and watch the clouds drift by all day. If you take a photograph of clouds, you have fixed a moment in time in which you see only one image of an ever-changing Cloud System, whereas the real clouds have moved on. Visual memory is not quite the same as photography since the image produced by memory isn't exactly what the artist was looking at. These cloud studies in Photoshop were done from memory.

Photoshop, about 7" x 7 1/2", August 9, 2015.

Crushed Cellars

It was a splendid, sun-filled August "Wine Saturday" and our destination was "Crushed Cellars," in Purcellville, VA. Crushed (I love the name) is a small winery which I visited a few years ago when it was just starting. The vines in front of their quirky designer building were tiny when I last saw them but they are now quite robust. The wine was excellent, including a Cabernet Sauvignon which was full of color and flavor. I did my art while sitting with the Wine Team outside under the winery's porch. Crushed Cellars hosts a mob of brown chickens whose eggs are sold to the customers. The chickens come up onto the porch and accept bits of food from the wine-sippers.

I drew this scene and the chickens in pen but didn't have time to color it in on-site, due to chickens and wine drinking. My memory of the colors is accurate though so this drawing was completed in the studio.

"Crushed Cellars" is brown tech pen ink on sketchbook page, about 8" x 11", colored in Photoshop. I'll be enhancing the original drawing with my colored pencils later on, so you can see which coloring medium you like the best. August 8, 2015.

Darkover Swordsman

I moved to the Metro DC area in 1988. DarkoverCon, in its eleventh year, also moved, to the location north of Baltimore that it still inhabits even under its current name, "ChessieCon." I was still doing the program covers and this is the one for 1988. It shows a left-handed swordsman waiting for his enemy to come out of hiding. I vaguely remember that the author MZ Bradley made her Darkovan humans left-hand dominant rather than Earth's right-hand majority. The architecture is taken from a photograph of an Italian mountain village. 

After I finished with DarkoverCon 1988 I took the original drawing and dropped the type panel and painted it in with color. Nowadays I'd just do it in Photoshop and leave the black and white drawing as an original.

Black ink on illustration board, colored in acrylic, 7" x 10", July 1988. If you've seen this before here on the By-Product, you're more devoted to this Blog than I am.