FRUSTRASHOW

I’ve not posted anything here in a long while because of the demands of my job but that doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned my art. I still work on the Justice League wall mural in my cousin’s room every Monday and, though I rarely praise my own work, I just got to say–I’m blown away at how great things are looking now that the mural is about 70% done!

So what follows is a quick update on this big project that I started November last year.

Nothing about this mural is easy but that’s why I love the challenge. If I’m not arching my back and twisting myself to access hard-to-reach areas at the bottom of the wall, I’m using a ladder to paint the top panels of the mural. Below, you’ll see the villain panels that I painted on the bottom-left corner of the wall:

In case you can’t recognize these characters, these are Penguin, Cheetah, and Sinestro. I would’ve loved to add more villains like Luthor, Reverse Flash and Black Adam but I didn’t want to make the design look too busy and confusing (maybe if I were painting the entire room–but I can’t even begin to imagine the difficulty of that task).

Immediately after I finished those panels, I took a photo of the entire wall. Check it out!

Next, I started painting the origin panels at the top, which tell the story of how each member of the Justice League included here came to be. The arrangement of these panels correspond to the position of each member’s full-body drawing below, which I have yet to paint. No question that my most favorite panel here is Batman’s origin, which was based on a cover of Batman: Year One that showed Bruce kneeling over the dead bodies of his parents. Those bats were a real pain to paint!

To the left of Bats’ origin panel is that of Supes’ showing his rocket escaping the exploding planet of Krypton. I really like the juxtaposition of the darkness of Batman’s panel with Superman’s more fantastic, sci-fi panel (which, of course, is no less tragic). You can also see the ladder I use to color these drawings:

And finally, the panels on the left side of the wall belong to Green Lantern and Wonder Woman. Hal Jordan is shown being chosen by Abin Sur as his replacement Lantern while Queen Hippolyta discovers that Diana won the tournament to send an emissary to Man’s world.

Next week, I’ll do The Flash’s origin panel and after that, I’ll move on to the centerpiece of the mural–the most critical part of this whole project. Barring any job-related emergencies, I should be able to wrap this up in 3-4 Mondays. Needless to say, I’m excited beyond my wits to see the whole thing finished. 🙂