Rocket Raccoon Hefts a Golden Cannon in Starlight — Print & Oil Painting

No brush touched this one. It is a three dimensional render, and the fur is where that shows. Every hair is simulated individually, light passes through the thin skin of the ears and turns it pink from behind, and the depth of field collapses the way a wide aperture collapses it, so the starfield dissolves into soft blue while the guard hairs on his shoulder stay sharp.

The head is tilted and the expression is doing several things at once. The brows are up and slightly uneven, the mouth is open just enough to show the lower teeth, and the eyes are looking off to our right at something with more interest than alarm. An old pale line of scar tissue runs above the near eye.

The weapon is carried across the chest with both arms under it. It is a heavy machined thing: a black barrel shroud with rows of bolts and vents along its length, a curved magazine housing below, and at the far end a wide ring of gold segments with amber light burning in the gaps between them. It is comfortably half his own body mass.

Behind him the space is a flat blue field with small out of focus stars scattered through it and no other feature at all. Saturation is high and brightness low, so the gold vents and the orange in his fur are the only warm notes and they sit close together in the lower half of the frame.

Carrying a cannon was the second career. He comes from an abandoned colony in a sealed off region of space, a hospital world where the animals brought in as company for the patients were altered until they could stand upright and think, so that they could look after the place once the staff had gone. He was its ranger first and its head of security afterwards, and the gun in his arms is what that turned into. From our Marvel collection, next to the same figure small on a ridge under a blue sky and the muzzle and teeth painted close up in thick strokes.