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18×24, pencil, March 2010

HUGE piece by Eric, his largest commission yet!  I’ll let him describe it…

Well, this big boy is DONE! Wow was that large! (18 x 24). My intention when I started this piece was to do the figures in mechanical pencils and the background in a 6-b wood pencil. When I got to the background I didn’t like the contrast in texture that the two leads left, so I did the background with the mechanical pencil. I have already wrote about how i set this piece up. You can read about that here.

The world of comics can be a funny place for anything resembling logic. One of my favorite quotes from the movie “Stand By Me” shows this too well…

“Boy, you don’t know nothing! Mighty Mouse is a cartoon. Superman’s a real guy. There’s no way a cartoon could beat up a real guy.”

So when I say that my take on a character, it is due to some logic I have in my head about comics, specious as it may be. The Vulture, Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus and Electro I didn’t do really any changes to. I made Vulture look a little younger, Doc Ock a little more in shape, other than that I love the designs of the characters.

When it came time to do Sandman I didn’t want to do that striped shirt and the mace hand. I knew that. I liked the idea of him being very elemental. A force of nature. I had the most fun drawing him. If you can see in the detail of that character I drew the majority of him using little circles. In all seriousness I love doing very tiny tedious things like that.

The way Venom is portrayed has always confused me. I know the character and what the symbiote is about, but the massive bulk never made sense to me. I rendered it as if the symbiote was using Brock (or Gargan) as an endo-skeleton and to imitate the musculature of the human body around the person.

All I can add about Spider-man is that when I first put him to paper I did the lines on his costume for the webs but it really flattened him out. I remembered that Alex Ross said something about using the 3-D effect of the webs (as in the movie) to help give the red part of the costume shape.

This is a big piece, so some of the detail is lost in the picture I took. I took some close-ups of various areas so you could see some of the details.

In closing I’d like to thank you for taking the time to look at this piece, and a BIG thank you to Alex Gonzales for commissioning the piece!

-Eric

 

 

Tags : Doctor Octopus, Elektro, Eric W. Meador, Marvel Comics, sandman, spider-man, The Vulture, venom, Wednesday's Heroes