Deadpool Drawn in Pencil Amid a Blood Splatter — Print & Oil Painting

This is a drawing rather than a painting and the medium is the first thing you see. The figure is built from graphite and coloured pencil laid in directional hatching, with the white of the paper left bare for the highlights along the shoulder plate and the jaw of the mask. Every value has been worked up in layers instead of mixed on a palette.

He is turned three quarters to his left, head level, shoulders squared, and the pose gives nothing away. The mask is drawn with real care around the eyes, where the black panels are densest and the white patches cleanest. The further the pencil travels from the face the looser it gets, until the lower edge of the torso simply stops and becomes blank paper.

The armour still reads clearly. A dark grey shoulder guard with a buckled strap crossing the chest, a zip running down the front of the suit, banded forearms, and one sword drawn diagonally up out of the top right corner with cord wrapping visible on the hilt.

Around him the artist has flung wet red across the white in fat irregular blots, some with tails, some with satellite droplets, none of them touching the face. It is the only wet material in the picture and the only pure colour, and it sits on top of the drawing rather than inside it.

Putting that red next to a red suit undoes a line the character uses himself. Asked about the colour, he has explained more than once that it is chosen so nobody can tell when he is bleeding, a joke about tailoring that doubles as an accurate account of what his healing factor costs. On white paper, with the blood outside the figure instead of on it, the explanation stops working. From our Marvel collection, next to the same head painted flat in red and black and the same mask tilted, a hand at the chin.