Your Line Work is Showing!

If anything shows us how a technique is used, an approach to how an effect was created, or how even the artist team thinks, we can look at their pre-finished work-in-progress. I found this posted by an anonymous owner of the HULK 340 original pencils and inks.
(Click for larger image.)


Notice the feathering of the HULK's hair in the original inks to allow the light blue color to show through in the final rendering so not to oversaturate the blacks in the reflection. You can tell the inker worked mostly with technical pens when rendering McFarlane's pencils. The constant line width and even in the feathering. Maybe he used a sharpee for the solids. I also enjoy the small nuances such as the over rendering of the black that crosses over the cover border line on the left. Wycek's small ruler smudge on the lower right corner also adds a tangible proof of human error whereas today's pieces are perfected so much in Photoshop you can never tell anymore.

Circular composition so your eye wanders from Wolvie, up his claws to Hulk's face, to the title of the book and back down to Wolvie. Nicely done. One last choice I enjoyed about this piece was McFarlane's choice to have Wolvie's left hand cross in front almost giving him that running toward feeling.

There's something revealing about just the black and white image. My college professor often said that if the piece doesn't work in black and white, then it won't work in color. This piece clearly works in black and white defining that statement.

Feel free to comment on what you see and ENJOY!