Genius at work
Over at Comic Art Fans, you'll find a new set of video clips featuring popular artist Adam Hughes creating a sketch for a fan at the National Comic Convention in New York City last weekend. Hughes is an entertaining personality in addition to being a talented artist, and the insight into his creative process is both instructive and oddly engaging. You'll spend about 20 minutes viewing the five clips — 20 minutes better spent than watching some ludicrous reality show on the tube. (Adam's hilarious take on the side benefits of drawing with Sharpie markers is worth the time spent, all by itself.)
Here's a game you can play as you watch and listen: See how quickly in the film you can guess which comic character Hughes is drawing. (No fair viewing the clips out of sequence.)
Incidentally, anyone wondering what to buy me for Christmas? An Adam Hughes sketch would do the trick nicely. Adam signs his work with the monogram "AH!" for good reason.
Here's a game you can play as you watch and listen: See how quickly in the film you can guess which comic character Hughes is drawing. (No fair viewing the clips out of sequence.)
Incidentally, anyone wondering what to buy me for Christmas? An Adam Hughes sketch would do the trick nicely. Adam signs his work with the monogram "AH!" for good reason.
SwanShadow was randomly pounding the keyboard at 12:11 AM
2 insisted on sticking two cents in:
Hughes? He's quite good though his covers for WW were almost...hmmmm...risque? (Nothing wrong with that but I heard more than a few customers put off from buying issues, usually women and mothers buying for their kids.
Sigh. Lynda Carter made WW so beautiful yet so...wholesome.)
That's interesting. Hughes came into comics after my avid reading years, so mostly what I know of his work is what I've seen displayed by other art collectors and heard in discussions with same. In that crowd, he's spoken of with the same reverence that we'd have accorded a John Romita, Sr. in my day, or a George Pérez in the next generation. His original art is highly prized (and highly priced) and rather difficult to come by — when he appears at a con, his sketch list apparently fills faster than anyone's.
I can understand why some people, women especially, might be put off by his "good girl" art. But in my very limited experience in commissioning work from artists with similarly sensual styles (Al Rio and Michael Dooney, specifically), I've found that they've been more than willing to accommodate my request that they draw something I wouldn't be embarrassed for my wife and daughter to see. Dooney was very careful, in fact, when working on my Ms. Marvel commission, to make sure I was comfortable with him depicting her in her original bare-midriff costume.
Adam Hughes seems like the kind of artist who, if asked to keep things tasteful, could adjust easily and still create a gorgeous piece of art. I wouldn't feel the least bit awkward displaying, for example, the piece he draws in the video interview at Comic Art Fans, or many (though by no means all) of the other Hughes artworks shown in collectors' galleries there. Given the raves Adam generates, I suspect that if he did borderline risque work for DC, it was a matter of giving the editors — and a majority (though certainly not all) of the fans — what they wanted (or what TPTB at DC thought they wanted).
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