WORK STAGES on a surprisingly significant (to me) 2013 cover illo! (Patreon)

So! Here are the Work Stages for a 2013 variant cover I drew for Marvel's Deadpool, a piece which proved to be direly fateful for my work process, as you'll see.

Final colors by the skillful Photoshoppers of the fine coloring studio Guru eFX, by the way.

After flailing through a bunch of different roughs, I found one that I liked, or could at least tolerate, and proceeded to the pencils:

And then disaster struck, dear Patrons!

For, you see, as I tried to ink the g-d piece with my beloved Japanese Zebra-brand "maru" pen-tips—similar in appearance but vastly superior in performance to the crowquill pen-tips you can find in any American art store—the surface of the Marvel paper I was inking on began to shred uncontrollably. The once silky-smooth, graceful inking of my Zebras was gone, replaced by clogged pen-tips and raggedy-ass ink lines that frustrated the hell out of me.

In the end, I managed to finish the piece with teeth gritted, but every single line I inked was a maddening struggle. In the weeks and months that followed, I desperately tried out many different inks and varying types of art board to find a combo that would allow my beloved Zebras to function adequately again, but nothing worked.

Not long after, I switched over to inking with Pentel's marker-like PITT Artist Pens, which delivered maaaaybe about 65-70% of the quality of my old maru pens' linework, but boasted the huge advantage of working on almost any paper surface.

12 years later, I tried out my old Zebras once more on the Marvel art board I was using to draw that upcoming Crypt of Shadows Wolverine vs. Man-Thing story a few months ago:

...and only managed to ink Man-Thing's severed hand in panel 4 before discarding the Zebra pen-tip, as once again it was shredding the art board's surface. Everything else in that story was inked with my now customary Pentel PITT Artist Pens, alas.

Goodbye, my beloved Zebras!

BTW, this Deadpool piece boasts a truly bizarre postscript which I'll cover—ha ha!—in a future post. Believe it or not, I was so frustrated with inking this illo that, in the midst of the ordeal, I stayed up all night and cranked out a completely different cover image without editorial approval. Golly!

Anyhoo, I can see at least two or three more Work Stages possibilities for cover illos from this era lurking in my nested, confusingly labeled HD folders, so you can expect to see more of these pieces parceled out over the next few weeks or months, okay?

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: Not sure ATM, but you will see something in the next M/W/F open slot, folks.