Black Widow Wields Batons in Neon Pink Light — Print & Oil Painting

This is flat vector drawing and nothing else: contour and colour, with no rendered texture anywhere in the picture. Shadow is stated as one darker shape, hair is drawn as a dozen separate ribbons, and the two light sources are given as pure colour rather than as light, teal down her left side and hot magenta down her right, meeting along the centre of the face.

A magenta triangle stands in the middle of a navy field flecked with small white stars, and she sits inside the point of it, seen from the hips up. The body is turned to her left and the head is brought back around to the right, so the shoulders and the face are working against each other.

Her right arm is raised and folded behind the head, her left hand rests on the hip, the jaw is set and the eyes come level at us. The suit is black with a pale X of straps crossing the chest and banded segments running down the sleeve.

The two batons need describing carefully. They cross the picture on parallel diagonals, one entering at the upper right and one at the lower left, both drawn as ridged black shafts with a highlight along the top edge, and neither of them can be traced to a hand inside the frame. The composition is using them as lines. Blue leads with crimson second at high saturation and the lowest brightness in this group.

Bringing other people's weapons into things is a habit of hers. In 1964, four issues into her published life, she talked a carnival archer into going after the man in the metal suit on her behalf, which is how one of the better known members of the team first arrived in print: as her instrument, in somebody else's book, on the wrong side of it. Both of them ended up on the roster within a decade. From our Marvel collection, beside the archer in question, drawing his bow amid wreckage and the same suit with both arms open among paint streaks.