Rocket Raccoon Sketched Smiling Beside His Rifle — Print & Oil Painting

Coloured pencil on a black ground, worked far past the point most people would stop. The fur is built from thousands of short directional strokes, each one a separate hair, with the palest greys and creams laid last over the darker layers so that the guard hairs sit visibly on top of the undercoat. Calling it a sketch undersells it: every square centimetre of the figure is finished.

The face is smiling and that is unusual for this character. The mouth is closed and turned up at the corners, the cheeks lift, the eyes are warm brown with a clean catchlight in each, and the head tilts a few degrees to his left. The black mask markings run from the eyes down across the muzzle, and the ears are rimmed in dark grey with pink showing faintly inside.

The costume is orange red, padded and buckled: a vest or harness pack with fastenings across the chest, a grey shoulder plate on his left, and webbing straps disappearing behind. Beside him on the left, standing vertically, is a long weapon drawn in graphite and warm brown: a receiver with a bracket on top, a shrouded barrel, and machined fittings at the muzzle.

Everything else is pure black. The artist has left roughly a third of the sheet untouched, so the figure floats with no floor, no horizon and no cast shadow, and the measurement comes back dark and low in saturation despite all that orange.

The smile has some justification behind it. In the comics he holds a command of his own, captain of a ship with a talking walrus for a first mate, and the register of those early stories is far closer to this drawing than to the snarling version most people picture. Putting the rifle beside him rather than in his hands gets the balance about right. From our Marvel collection, beside the same muzzle painted close up mid snarl and a leather jacket and drifting embers, looking back.