The Undisputed Era
Ink and watercolor on 18″ x 24″ watercolor paper
After the last couple of weeks I needed to do something a little more straightforward as a mental and creative reset, but I of course still needed to make an engaging image for you. My initial idea was “Yellow and black, maybe done as four panels like a comic book.” Really often that’s about all I do planning-wise and then play jazz from there.
Not everything has to be super-deep, right? My comparison is The Sex Pistols vs Led Zepplin: Both rock but in completely different ways with wildly different levels of complexity. This is a Sex Pistols painting.
So, just four panels felt a little bland and then I remembered the covers Cully Hamner did for his book Red with Warren Ellis, notably having the text running vertically down on the right side. Instead of keeping the same width for all of the panels, I instead made them stair-step down, creating some gravity. The letters are italicized to further that sense of movement.
With the negative space being all black I couldn’t spot a lot of ink for the figures, more using it minimally to separate them from the background. If I had used big spots of black on the figures they wouldn’t have read as well with all of that negative space.