Inspiration Thursday!

Welcome back to my artblog! It's the middle of the holiday season, but still I persevere in my attempt to post every single week day, rain or shine, hell or high water, caffeine or no ca-... No, that's too far.

If I'm out of coffee, and there's none around, all bets are off. You've been warned.

Today is Thursday, which means I'll be pulling something out of my magic art bag that relates to something that's been influencing me. I've been juggling a few things on my plate lately (who isn't?) and one those has been a pair of bust commissions, one of Iron Man and one of Black Cat. I sat down today to try and tackle the Iron Man bust, and found myself again returning to John Romita, Jr.

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The man's drawn a ton of comics! Man. Really, a lot. Half a Kirby, probably. Anyways, he had a short but memorable run on Iron Man's book in the late 80's. He has also been drawing Iron Man again in on Avengers for the last few months. I hadn't been thinking consciously about JRJR's Iron Man, but once I cracked open his Avengers books for reference (I was unfamiliar with the current configuration of the armor; Iron Man changes armor like I change underwear) I couldn't get it out of mind.

JRJR is a great fit for Iron Man. He really gets the power and eneryg of the character. Iron Man's strength and technology can be really fun to draw and you can see in his work that JRJR enjoys the character. Iron Man can also be tricky at times, due to the fact that the armor's faceplate doesn't really move and so the emotion of the man in the armor is pretty restrictive. JRJR gets around that with angles and shady and other nifty tricks of the trade.

Thanks for the inspiration JRJR!