Loki's Helmeted Face Drawn in Olive Pencil Tones — Print & Oil Painting

Every stroke of the pencil has been left showing on the toned paper. The hatching runs in clear directions across each plane, the layers sit on top of one another without blending, and the paper grain breaks the darkest passages. There is no smooth surface anywhere in the picture.

The crop is severe. The face occupies the left two thirds and the helmet is cut off by the top edge, so what we get is a brow plate, two cheek pieces and the beginning of the horns rather than the shape everybody recognises. The helm is olive gold, faceted into hard angular panels, with a pointed plate coming down over the centre of the forehead.

The face inside it is warm against all that green. Pinks and ochres are worked through the cheek and down the nose, olive is dragged into the shadow under the jaw, and the eyes are a clear saturated teal, both open, looking slightly up and past us. The mouth is closed and parted at the centre.

Down the right side of the sheet a broad vertical band of pale yellow green runs the full height, hatched hard in a single direction. It is deliberately ambiguous: it reads as cloth, or as a wall, or as a fall of light, and the artist has not decided.

The helmet in this drawing is not an heirloom from any old poem. The character is medieval in name only: the horned helm, the black hair and the green cape were all designed for the comics in 1962 by the artist who drew his first appearance, and none of the surviving sources put anything of the sort on the original figure. Cropping the horns out of the frame and painting the metal like sculpture is a fair way to treat an invented object. From our Marvel collection, beside the horns seen whole with a serpent wound through them and the same helmet among green and crimson strokes.