Entry 159: Avengers Covers 1,2,3

Welcome, everyone, to another blog entry by me, Dustin Weaver.

If you've looked me up because you saw my Avengers covers and thought, "Who's this jerk?" Well, that jerk is me. Hi. If you thought, "There's only room for one Dustin in comics and that is Dustin Nguyen!" Well, you're half right; there IS only room for one... I'm coming for you Nguyen... And if this post has google-alerted Dustin Nguyen, then hi, Dustin. See my last post for an explanation.

And that's what I'm talking about in this post. Dustin Nguyen. NO! AVENGERS COVERS!

So what I've posted is a bigger version of my covers. You can click on it, view it in its own window or whatever. It's big.

So lets go back to the evolution of this Avengers stuff. 

When Tom Brevoort e-mailed me asking if I wanted to be part of the AVENGERS team, it was like Nick Furry had e-mailed me. You could have lifted the text and made it dialogue for Samuel Jackson to say at the end of one of those movies. And when he told me who would be on the team, Jerom Opena and Dean White, Adam Kubert, and Mike Deodato, he might as well have said Thor, Hulk, Captain America, and Iron Man. And here I am, Hawkeye. I mean, those guys are big names in super hero comics right now. I'm really not. I was, and am, a bit intimidated.

As I understand it, me being a part of Avengers was Jonathan's idea. He wanted me to do the covers and originally he wanted me to do them a lot like my SHIELD covers. None of the characters leaping into your face, trying harder than they should to convince you that they are AWESOME! Something a little classier. Less is more, as in less trying to be awesome is more awesome. 

Here's an actual mock up Jonathan did using one of my SHIELD covers.

The idea would be to focus on a single character on each cover, Captain America on the first then Thor, then Iron Man, and so on. 

I did think that looked cool, but I was feeling like we had done that with SHIELD and I was looking for something different. Tom Brevoort mentioned the idea of connecting covers. I've never done that sort of thing and it seemed like an exciting challenge.

Here are my first takes on these covers.

The first idea is essentially the SHIELD covers idea.

In the second idea I tried to use the continuing image idea. 

We all agreed that the connecting covers idea was the better way to go, so we started hammering out that idea. We changed some posses, added characters, moved characters around, changed poses and then changed them back. There was a lot of back and forth, until we finally settled on this sketch.

As you can see, it's basically all there. 

Here's an interesting sketch I did to help clarify the way the camera turns through these covers. 

I wanted to make the point that all these figures are pointing in the same direction... It ends up looking like a bunch of Nazis.

Anyway, so we finally had our sketch and I could get started. Here are some proses photos.

And there is the final piece. All of the tones in the background were done digitally. All of the tones on the characters were done with markers.

There is more to the story of these covers, but I won't be able to talk about that until we get to covers 4,5, and 6, which I am also doing. In fact they are done.

Blogged and blogged.