R.I.P. Covered

Today, Robert Goodin announced that Covered blog will be ceasing publication after he runs a few more pieces in the coming weeks. I really enjoyed Covered, and it gave me a chance to do some tribute pieces to a variety of artists who’s work I truly enjoy, even tho’ it was often quite divergent from my own. Here are the four pieces I did for Covered over the last few years:

Adam Hughes is a huge guilty pleasure of mine… Well, sometimes he’s just a straight up pleasure, depending on how self-concious I’m feeling about my love of cheesecake. I love his Audrey Hepburn-inspired Catwoman, tho’ as always, I feel a need to ground her super-duper proportions a bit in my own versions. That catsuit had a big influence on the jumpsuits in Titan, too.
Fables #43, after James Jean, 2011

James Jean is just about the only thing I have ever enjoyed about Fables. There are any number of designs I might have picked out, I chose this one because it was relatively simple and I liked the djinn’s rubbery look… it reminded me of Paul Pope’s THB, another book that I always wanted to do a Covered version of… Anyways, this is my least favorite of my Covered pieces, but I guess its okay.

I was an X-MEn junkie during my teenage years, and I still peek my head into the franchise to see how it’s doing (most recently with Wolverine and the X-Men, beautifully illustrated by Nick Bradshaw), even if I know I can’t maintain any kind of patience with mainstream comics. Frank Cho is another one of these artists whom I adore, if somewhat from afar… I’ve never owned a comic he did, or one of those “Art of…” books either (I own cover books from bot Adam Hughes and James Jean and love both). Frank Cho can really, truly draw the hell out of stuff… but again, his ladies are maybe too bangin’. I love his cover here, tho’, so rad and totally what I remember loving in the X-Men comics of my youth. I quite like my own version here, too.

Finally, my most recent, and I guess final piece for Covered. Here, I felt like a fin de siecle artist copying one of the Renaissance Masters to help me learn my way. Jaime is just the best, and this cover is, I think, one of the most memorable and lovely of all time…which is remarkable, considering so little is going on here. Why does this speak to so many people?

Anyways, many thanks to Robert Goodin for running Covered, thanks to all the artists who created works for the blog, and finally, thanks to all the original creators who inspired all this work. I’ll continue to do these kinds of exercises once in a while, which I will post here and on Tumblr. I hope some of the other Covered artists do, too.