Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Alpha Flight #51 cover art: Barta pencils & Nowlan inks

This is the first (and last!) time I worked directly with my old buddy Hilary Barta.  I love the way he worked out the shadow patterns, especially on Wendigo.  By the way, Hil and I have differing memories of this piece.  A couple of years ago I commented that I inked it fairly straight and Hilary said, "I think you changed it more than you realize."  


I don't know who did the colors but they really overdid the knockout on the soldier in foreground. And the pink tint on Wendigo is an interesting choice.  Inside the book his shadows are light blue.












9 comments:

  1. Wonderful work over a helluva nice guy. Thanks so much for sharing.

    Did someone else sign this piece for you though? The "W" seems to have been left out.

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  2. I think the most interesting piece of this is the way you inked Wendigo's hair in the shadow of the rock. Did you go into the black rock with white ink or the other way around? I think that is an interesting effect you gave it and one I'm not sure I've really seen you do a lot. That is what is great about seeing this old stuff, seeing you work on stuff in a different way.

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  3. What a great pairing with both of your abilities with double lighting and spotting blacks! I love seeing this stuff!

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  4. great piece, hillary is one of my favorite artist as are you, so i'm geeking out a bit on this piece

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  5. Patrick, I'm not sure about the technique on the hair. It looks like it's just a fine quill pen. Nothing unusual. I'm fairly certain I didn't use white ink or paint.

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  6. Chris, there's no good explanation for the missing "W". It was just me being a dork.

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  7. Wow. That sure is an acidic looking color scheme! Colorist musta had some strong lemonade for lunch! The cover colors back then were usually done by George Roussos or Paul Becton. Could be one of them...

    Jose

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  8. I knew about Roussos but Becton is a new name to me.

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  9. Somehow I had overlooked this post until now. It's (mostly) fun to see this again, and I don't know if I've seen the pencils since I drew the thing. Carl was the only guy at Marvel crazy enough to let me pencil a non-humor book's cover. I'm not sure if I asked you this before, but did you letter the soldier's name-tag and then the office gave it the old white out?

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