Adam Hughes (born May 5, 1967) is an American comic book artist who has worked for companies such as DC Comics, Marvel Comics, Dark Horse Comics, Lucasfilm, Warner Bros. Pictures, Playboy magazine, Joss Whedon's Mutant Enemy Productions and Sideshow Collectibles.
He is best known to American comic book readers for his renderings of pinup-style female characters, and his cover work on titles such as Wonder Woman and Catwoman.
Hughes began his career in 1987. He penciled two short stories and the first issue of Death Hawk, created by Mark Ellis. In 1988 Hughes' work appeared in Comico's Maze Agency with co-creator/writer Mike W. Barr, and stayed on the book for one year. When Maze Agency was canceled by Comico, DC Comics offered him a job on Justice League America. He did both covers and internal renditions on that series for two years, before switching to providing covers only.
At the age of 24, Hughes moved to Atlanta, Georgia in order to join Gaijin Studios, believing that working more closely alongside fellow artists would improve his own skills. Hughes stayed with Gaijin Studios for 12 years.
Hughes then had a short stint on the Dark Horse Comics series Ghost.
He has also had stints on Penthouse Comix, Legionaires and PlayStation Magazine.
Hughes wrote and illustrated the interiors of the 1996 two-issue miniseries, Ordinary Heroes from Wildstorm. In late 1998 he began a five-year run as cover artist on DC Comics Wonder Woman. He also provided cover art on Tomb Raider from Top Cow Comics
When Wizards of the Coast created their d20-based Star Wars RPG, he created designs for both the original and revised core rulebooks, as well as the Star Wars: Invasion of Theed adventure game mini-RPG. When he reused his portrait of the Jedi guardian, Sia-Lan Wezz (his favorite character), for the cover of Purge as a gag, there was such editorial interest that she was written into the story as one of Darth Vader's early victims.
Although Hughes was announced as the writer and artist on All Star Wonder Woman in 2006, he explained at the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con International that that project was "in the freezer" for the time being, due to the difficulty involved in both writing and illustrating himself. As of October 2010, a page on his website indicates that after the current Catwoman series ends with issue #82, Hughes will cease his DC cover work, and will focus on producing the six-issue All Star Wonder Woman series.
Because of the time-consuming nature of his style of illustration, Hughes does not often do monthly series work, and as an example, points to the 1996 miniseries he wrote and illustrated, Ordinary Heroes, which took him ten months to complete. Hughes varies his style between projects, sometimes exhibiting a "cartoony" look in his drawings, and at other times employing reference to achieve a photorealistic work in his art, as in an assignment he did for Playboy magazine, in order to produce more varied works for his portfolio, should his prospects in the comic book industry ever fade.
When doing sketches for fans at conventions, Hughes draws on 11 x 14 Strathmore bristol, as he prefers penciling on the rougher, vellum surface rather than smooth paper, though he does enjoy brush inking on smoother paper. He does preliminary undersketches with a lead holder, because regular pencils get worn down to the nub too quickly in his opinion. During this process he uses a Sanford Turquoise 4B lead, a soft lead, in order to draw more spontaneously, whereas using a harder lead would cause him to feel as if he were "fighting" the paper. He uses the same process for his cover work, though when working at home in Atlanta, whose humid weather tends to dampen the paper, he sometimes uses a B lead or 2B lead, which acts like a 4B in that environment. In addition, he does cover work in his sketchbook, before transferring the drawing to virgin art board with a lightbox. After darkening in the construction lines that he wishes to keep, he erases the lighter ones with a kneaded eraser before rendering greater detail. For more detailed erasures, he uses a pencil-shaped white eraser, and to erase large areas, he uses a larger, hand-held white eraser, which he calls a "thermonuclear eraser", because it "takes care of everything".
To ink his drawings, Hughes favors Faber-Castell PITT artist pens, which come in a variety of points, including fine, medium, bold and brush tips, which Hughes uses for brush work on convention sketches, though not for cover work. In a similar manner to his penciling, Hughes tends to ink different portions of the sketch at random. He uses Sharpie markers to fill in larger areas, which he feels would be too tedious to render in pencil, such as the costumes of characters like Batman, which he believes should be rendered in black rather than blue.
Hughes will sometimes use colored markers to embellish parts of a sketch, as when he uses red for female characters' lips, or a silver pen to render scenes set in outer space. When rendering an entire sketch in grey tones or full color, Hughes, who once used Primsacolor or Design 2 markers, explained at the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con International that for the past four years, he had been using Copic markers, a set of which a fan gave him as a gift, because Copic markers are refillable, and because he found that they produce longer-lasting colors, and can be used several times longer than other brands, as he was still using the same package of nibs as of August 2010 that came with the first set of Copics he was given four years previously. When using Copics, he takes care to erase his pencils, and to not work dark-to-light, because of the mottled effects that result from doing so.
