Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, entertainment, fantastic four, frank cho, invisible woman, marvel

Evolution Of A Fantastic Four Cover By Frank Cho

Published Sun, 26 Apr 2015 18:00:23 -0500

Artist Frank Cho shared a process piece for the cover for Fantastic Four #608 on his website today. There is a good lesson for artists in this as well as Frank explains below.

Found this in my old sketch folder. I have a mountain of sketches lying all over my studio. I often let my daughters use the old sketch papers to draw their stuff, Recycle is the mantra in our house. :-)

Anyway, here's a funny behind the scene story about this Fantastic Four #608 cover. I turned in the original sketch cover idea (the far left image) to my editor who approved right away. As I was drawing the cover, I felt the whole thing was "off" and I wasn't too happy with it. So I drew another version of the cover idea (center piece) and I still felt it was "off". I thought the second version was worse than the first version – the figure is stiff and everything was awkward. The more I tried to fix it the worse it got. It was a nightmare.

So I walked away from the drawing. Completely abandoned it. I actually stuck the two cover sketches into my mound of old sketches and tried to erase them from my memory. After a few days later, I came back and started from scratch. And the final version of the cover was born. (Far right image.)

Sometimes the best course of action in art is abandonment and restart with a fresh eye.

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FRANK CHO