The Art of Blake Henriksen

The Art of Blake Henriksen

Thursday, March 19, 2015

90's X-Men Animated




It’s FINALLY heeeeeere!!!!

Yes I know I’m a bit excited but I’ve been working on this piece on and off for months and I am sooooooo glad that it’s finally over (though it was a lot of fun)!

This piece is my homage to the 90’s Animated X-Men cartoon, one of my favorite 90’s cartoons and easily one of the most influential towards me as an artist. I absolutely love that it was heavily influenced by Jim Lee’s designs, something that was so important to me as a kid since I was getting into comics during his legendary run on the comic book series. He’s always been one of my artistic idols and it’s great to have the chance to put my own spin on his work.

I will say that this piece was a lot of fun for me when it comes to my “comic book” style and I think I grew a lot through it. I’m continually trying to refine what I feel my comic book style is. I’m really striving to showcase a painted style that reflects some of my biggest comic book influences (like J. Scott Campbell, Jim Lee, and Marko Djurdjevic) while at the same time bringing an exaggerated style from animated designers that I love (Phil Bourassa influences me so much nowadays, probably more than anyone realizes).

For those of you that are still here and interested, artistically this was a real challenge for me. With my previous Batman Animated Collage piece I had worked with roughly 22 characters but with this one I decided to push even higher by roughly 10 more characters. That definitely presented a lot of challenges when it came to composition and layout. However, more than anything, the real challenge was the patience to keep going and paint so many characters in one piece. Luckily I made it through and while no painting ever truly gets to the level of epicness that I’m striving for, at least for where I’m at right now, at this point and time in my artistic growth, I can say that it was the best that my skills would allow me to accomplish.

Anyways, I’ve been sitting on this for a while and thought it’s best now to put it out there for all of you to see. I was hoping that I could unveil it at Emerald City Comic Con 2015 but it was too much of a rush and I didn’t want to sacrifice quality. So long and short of it, this piece will be making it’s debut at MegaCon 2015!

In closing, I hope this piece brought back some warm and fuzzy nostalgic feelings for you and you remember the 90’s with fondness; it’s one of my favorite decades! Thank you for all your support and if you feel so inclined please like this and feel free to share it with your friends!