Tony Stark's Bare Face Above the Mark 85 Armor — Print & Oil Painting

Ink and watercolour on white, and the wash has been allowed to misbehave everywhere except on the face. Violet, cornflower and dull red are dropped in behind the shoulders and run down the paper in long vertical threads, several of them travelling most of the height of the sheet, and the same red is flicked across the whole picture in fine spatter.

The head is bare and it is the one tightly drawn passage. Dark hair combed back off the forehead, a beard trimmed to a hard line along the jaw and around the mouth, level brows, and both eyes looking straight out at us. Nothing about it is loose or approximate.

The body below is the armour and it has been treated as though it were weather. Crimson plate over the chest and the shoulders with a white triangle at the sternum, and from behind the back two long angular blades sweep up and out to both sides, painted in flat red with the wash escaping past their edges in places and running.

There is no background at all. Bare paper on all four sides, the colour gathered into a rough halo behind the figure and nothing beyond it. Brightness measures high, pink red leads and blue follows, and both readings come from the splashes rather than from the man.

Putting the person on top of the machine is the right way round for this one. The character was modelled on a real industrialist, an aviator and manufacturer known for money, aircraft and eccentricity in roughly that order, and the writer who invented him said so plainly. The armour was always the plot; the man underneath was drawn from life. From our Marvel collection, alongside the same blades extended, helmet down, in cold mist and his bare face above heavy poster lettering.