Hi All
Just a quick note to let you know that for those who are interested in such things - I've posted the full series of scans for the cover to LSH #5 from the intial thumbnail to finshed inks up on my website gallery!

Hope you're all enjoying your copies of #2 today!

Cool! Thanks Barry! Can't wait to pick up #2 (about an hour away from it)!

Hope you'll be around later when it's bantered back and forth!

I'll definitely be here tomorrow - it's getting a bit late here in the UK and I'll be closing up the studio soon!

Of course - you guys will actually see the issue before me - as my comps still haven't arrived!

See you then Barry. So great to have you here.

Have a good night!

Hunt

Great stuff Barry - thanks for sharing! I like the felt marker version of the cover as much as the finished piece.

Thanks Drake - Steve Wacker keeps saying we should print a whole story in that style...but I think that's just because he knows how much quicker I'd be getting the pages in!

Barry, what is that Scarlett Witch artwork on your website?

Hi Nighthawk - That was a piece of artwork I did for the charity auction at UK Comic Convention 2003 - Chris did the color version of it, which I think was the first time we worked together.

Sigh. Poor Wanda. I still haven't gotten over what they did to her. She looks great in your pic, however

Thanks Cru! I totally agree with you about Wanda too!

Well looks like Wanda fans will be getting to see more of her in Excalibur and in the House of M

followed the link and am, again blown away by this. WOW!

Barry, I like the way you break it down into foreground and background. Is that just preference or are there technical (printing or stuff) reasons you do it that way?

Even though it was a joke I can see why Steve wants to run with your felt marker version. It is better that some finished versions i have seen.

I liked seeing the whole process from roughs to pencils and inks. to be honest there is a quality in your pencils i find especially pleasing, even to the extent of liking the fine detail in the pencils work to the inked version.

More please.

Thanks FL
I'll try to have a lot more scans of pencils from #1 and #2 on the site soon!

Very nice, Barry.

I'm always interested in the "behind the scnes" type stuff.

J

Faraway Lad and Drake, I'm right with you on your admiration for Barry's marker "roughs" (I have a hard time calling them that!).

I've had the privilege to ink 900+ pages of Barry's pencils over the years - I think the 12 or so pages I did in LSH #2 actually put us over 1,000), and I've been captivated by his marker work since the first time I saw it!

It's kinda funny, since the things that many people enjoy about Barry's drawing style - the precise linework, the attention to even the smallest details, etc - all that is essentially gone in the markers. Yet, to me they capture a spontaneous purity of his artistic vision, before it gets "refined" into a "finished" product! I almost always like sketches better than finished drawings too, so naturally I bring that POV to this discussion!

Actually, it gives me an idea - I've done paintings from his pencil drawings before, but I wonder what it would be like to do a painting based on a marker piece? Hmmmm...

Anyway -hope you enjoyed my humble efforts on issue #2!

I agree with you James. I did a colored graphic from one of Barry's pencilled sketches from a convention and I think it came out just beautifully. I don't mean that I did anything special but that Barry's pencils were that nice to begin with.

So if you do one from Barry's markers would you post a scan of it here so we could see it too? That would be really sweet. As a group we're kind of obsessive about things like that.

Interestingly, Gil Kane used to do a lot of work with markers and it showed. A lot of his pieces used for covers in the 80's were pretty rough. Barry's work with markers has a totally different quality. I got to see him do some of it while we were hanging out and pesering him at a con a few months back and I was amazed at the quality he kept cranking out hour after hour.

Oh, and hearty welcome aboard from the Yellow Kid and the Primary Color Gang.

Thanks, Yellow Kid!

There have been several "prominant" artists I know of who used markers to ink their work - with varying degrees of success, IMHO.

The big difference for me between what Gil Kane did and Barry is partly execution - mostly, I believe it's a radically different artistic POV (or "style", as that concept is often interpreted).

Kane was almost exclusively a "linear" artist, using lines, hatching and cross-hatching to "describe form". This dovetailed with his George Bridgeman-like chisled anatomy, but all those lines, with no variation and little, if any, shadow areas of solid black often left the finished drawings "sketchy" looking or lacking substance (for me!). Compare Kane's work when being inked by Tom Palmer, Klaus Janson or Kevin Nowlan - they added in all those things that weren't part of Kane's artistic vision, and I believe, made the drawings much better!

Now, Barry - and this is just my informed opinion, of course - literally "looks" at his drawings very differently from Kane. After very roughly establishing basic composition and placement of the figures in pencil, my guess is that he uses a brush marker to do 90% of the marker rough, and maybe 10% using the fine tip marker where he has to . That methodology allows him to work with black and white shapes to design the panels instead of lines, which makes a huge difference in determining where the light and shadow areas should go - and THAT means that he's actually "painting" with the markers, rather than "drawing" with them! I believe that he's a natural painter - he just doesn't know it

I'd like to see what you did with Barry's con sketch too, if you'd care to post it!

My pleasure. It's down in one of our art threads in the Legionnaires Bits forum.
I'll dig around for minute and see if I can find that link.
...
...
...
Sorry to make you wait so long



Barry's pencils -

This was a special gift for one of our board administrators here that Barry did at WWDallas back in November and I just had to mess around with it a little to see what colors would look like on it.

[shameless plug] If you have any free time you ought to check out some of the work some of these guys knock out. Loser Lad and Sketch lad do some fantastic stuff. [/shameless plug]

Nice explanation for Gil Kane's work too. There's always a Teen Titans cover that comes to my mind when these discussions pop up. It was pretty rough. I don't mean to knock his work for a minute, I remember the stunning beauty of works like Blackmark and all those issues of Green Lantern very fondly.

Barry's set a pretty high benchmark for any artist that follows him on the Legion and I'm lovin' it!

Maybe we should start a competition to see who can spot which pages James inked (extremely well) of #2!

Nice job, Yellow Kid! I like the decision to use the logo behind the energy - creates a good sense of depth!

I'd post something back atcha, but frankly, I have no idea how - d'oh!

Check your PM box JP.
And thanks for the compliment. I don't quite have the fine technical skills of a couple of the other guys here at LW but I think my sense of composition brings some life to the pieces I do.

How many pages Barry? I suspect I know where James's pages start and finish but I'm not as familiar with modern artists as I was with everybody's styles when I was younger.

Ok, first guess-
The brushwork seems to change with the big shot of Brainy's head on page 7 and continues until the last couple of pages where we get back to the clubhouse.

Hi Yellow Kid!
The inking on pages 6 & 7 (headshot and roll call pages) is me!

I guess it would only be fair to give you a clue as to the answer...
The rest of the book is, I believe, split 13/15 between Mick and James - but not even I am absolutely sure who did which pages. The pages are somewhat inter-mingled and I think it says a great deal about the quality of James and Mick's work that the differences are so hard to spot!

Have fun trying to tell who did what!

Nice coloring job on the sketch too!

Yellow Kid,

I just looked at your link for Barry's design sketches. There are at least 2 links missing on the thumbnails. The one for Micro Lad (hah, this makes me roofle each time I think about his name change) and Saturn Girl. Could you please add those links? Thanks.

Sure thing.I noticed about a week ago that those links were acting a little "hinky". I'll fix that and might even remake that page then add he latest bits to it later today (I think)
I wasn't sure anybody was still browsing through it.
Thanks for the headsup SK.
-a free site service is worth what I paid for it-

Phil Jimenez does his inking (if he's doing his own) with marker pens. You can certainly see a big difference between when he's doing his own and when Andy Lanning (his usual inker)does it. Phil has quite a soft, slightly blurred inking style (without losing the details) whereas Andy has a much sharper style, much closer to Phil's pencils.

I don't know how many other people are interested in this guessing game, Barry, but it brings back fond memories for me!

As a comics fan, I used to intensely study the different pencilers, inkers and colorists, to the point where I could pretty accurately guess all three on comics I had never seen, just by looking at a page. Many friends tried to stump me, but my record was in the 90-some percentiles of success!

That ended with the big comics explosion that brought blizzards of new creators into the business, and the move to computer coloring, where it's much more difficult (if not impossible) to distinquish individual styles.

Still, I spent many happy hours 'back in the day' playing the"who did this?" game

(A variant of the game is to actually draw some little rendering that's a regognizable part of someone's style - the way they do agitrons, explosions, a unique hatching style (Barry Smith was always great for that), something about the way they did faces or eyes or fingers - just draw one simple little thing and see if the other person can guess the artist! If not, you draw the next clue - kind of "Name That Tune" for comics art

lol
Wow, I didn't know anybody else did that. My old roomate and I used to pick apart old comics that way...and yeah the b/w explosion in the mid 80's brought so much new talent in that I got lost.

I guess I flubbed MY guess at who did what in the new LSH issue
*sniff*

My guesses -

Barry inked - 6-7

James inked - 8-19, 30

Mick inked - 1-5, 20-29

That's a good guess, Nightcrawler, but not quite

I inked most, but not all of 8-19, and half of 20-30. Hints: I did 8 and 23!

Yellow Kid, assuming I did this right (never an ironclad assumption), here's Barry's beautiful pencil drawing, the drawing "inked" with Dr. Martin's dyes and then transparently painted over with watercolor and copic design markers.

I had never tried inking something in color before painting - usually, I opaquely paint right over the drawing. This was just an experiment I thought was worth trying

OK, let's see how this works...

Whoa!
Beautifully done James!
Really nice to see the process in phases that way too.
You guys are really spoiling us by posting this wonderful stuff. Is that for a cover or an in-house add?

WOW! James that's beautiful!

OK, my revised guess -

Barry inked 6-7

James inked 8-14, 23-30

Mick inked 1-5, 15-22

PS. Can we please have page numbers next time!

Great stuff, James!

Beautiful. It almost glows.

I think James did a fantastic job with that piece too - I hope we'll get to do more of this type of thing!

What was the Dinobot sans Grimlock cover for?

Thanks for the kind words everyone!

There was no professional commercial motivation for it - I just really liked Barry's drawing and was inspired to do it for fun

(A pretty good reason to do things, actually )

OK, you're really close, Nightcrawler! What the heck, here it is: I did 8-14, 23,26,27,29 and 30!

You're very close, Nightcrawler! Ah, what the heck - here it is: I did 8-14,23,26,27,29 and 30!

Oops - sorry for the double, everybody!

Yellow Kid, my friend (and fellow artist) David reminds me of one more variant of the artistic guessing game!

We called it "Who walked by?" You start by drawing part of a figure in a certain artist's style, and the other person has to guess the artist. If successful, that person then says, "Yeah, but who walked by?", at which point you assume a completely different artist pitched in to help finish the drawing. You do some little thing that ditinguishable to the second artist, and the first person has to guess who - that - is! This goes back and forth until you end up with a drawing that has theoretically been partially done by every artist in comics!

Well...it was fun at the time

That's great! we were never that good at the art chores (although Rod did a pretty good John Byrne imitation when he wanted to)
Our version of that would be to quote or mimick certain writers and see if anyone could get it.
Of course that's sort of turned into comic book cliche these days.

Must
...
finish
...
pizza!