Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Long Live the Legion! The Full Process of Cover #5 + Wonder Woman pinup!

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
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finish
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pizza!