Richard Cox

Black Cat Takes a Trophy by Richard Cox

11×14 – full color copics – The Black Cat sneaks out of Peter’s room with a little trophy.  Another fantastic full color commission by Richard.  

In Richard’s own words:

Whew, there’s a lot I could say about doing this one, I think. I put a lot of thought in the design, and went through a couple of different sketches before settling in on the one that became this (Another one had Felicia pulling the costume out of a trunk and smiling over her shoulder). Okay, so, color theory. Lots of greens and little blue. This makes the red in Spidey’s costume, BC’s skintones, and Peter’s sleeping (not dead, DAMMIT) hand really stand out. Notice also how the muted blue greens and the earthy bricks really make the sky look like there’s some space out there. The blue greens also try pull the whole of the image back, being less contrasty than true green, and serve to give the composition some depth and mood. Composition. Squares and quadrants, more of them than you might notice at first. The window, the framed photo, the page itself, are all blocked into quadrants. I break the rigidity of this with the soft S-curves of the curtain and Felicia, as well as the illicitly-acquired costume. Symbiology (wait, what?) . Poor Mary Jane. reflecting the current (I guess it’s still current…) plotlines in Spider-Man books he has a great big X across her, cast by Black Cat. She’s also, you know, out of vogue, and the B/W (shaded blue by moonlight) photo gives her more of a classic, days gone by feel. At least, those were all my INTENTIONS with the above. I could go on a bit more, but jeez, why? Finally, I made a couple of purposeful nods to Adam Hughes here – the blue green background is an homage to a Black Cat giclee by AH I was given as a gift, and the white paint on marker approach to her hair is my trying to learn, apply, and change the style he used on a Black Cat con sketch. I need to experiment a bit more with it to really make that technique mine. And that, kids, is the end of the lesson. Stay in school.

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