Gerz Blog

I did a quick colour mock-up on the computer of the direction I think I'll take in colouring the Regency In Ruins.

We'll see how it turns out when I colour it in the real world.

Inking...

...and inking...

...and inking...

...and inked.

Now, for some colour...

stay tuned.

I was intimidated by a Swamp Thing.

However, at times I was intimidated by an aardvark. Who gets to say these things and mean it? Frankly, I didn't want to screw up a Bernie Wrightson drawing—I admire his work. When Charles asked me to ink the figures and fill in the background for The Swamp Thing, he made it clear that he wanted to see my take on the art and make it my own. 

I would use 555 shades of grey.

My thinking was to stray as far away from Bernie's style as I could imagine. Bernie creates contrast using one set of lines for tone and shading. It's very black and white.  I pictured everything fading into the mist. This lent itself to inking layers of intersecting, overlapping lines to create subtle grey tones much like the Jupiter pages I had done for Cerebus.

First I buried Bernie.

I had to pencil over Bernie's sketch with my own crosshatching to turn it into my interpretation. Now I could carry on as if they were my own pencils. I hadn't done a lot of heavy crosshatching lately and I was curious to see what would happen if I pushed the limit and had the entire page covered in tiny, little lines. Right up until the end, I was convinced I was screwing up. 

I didn't film my progress mainly because I didn't want to document me fu**ing this up. 

Plus it's incredibly tedious. Nobody really wants to watch that, do they? I took pictures of the sections I had finished to show a time lapse, but didn't set up the camera to take pictures at two minute intervals. I've never been comfortable with people watching me draw. 

I like to sit, crammed in my corner, exercising my "I can draw anywhere" option. 

I did the best job I could, but reality has a way of creeping in...

The lighting was never going to be right. With the moon behind the characters, they should be in silhouette. Charles came to the rescue with his words of wisdom. 

"It's a comic!" he said. "Make it cool."

I am never 100% happy with how things turn out, but this is pretty close to the way I envisioned the end result. I still think Bernie would have done a better job. Now it's up to others to decide if I screwed up. 

Watch the time lapse here!  

I've had another "Chick In A Tree" to colour, have a "Gerhard Dreams" to work on and I still have the Bernie Wrightson piece simmering on the back burner of my mind but I thought that I'd have a page from The Wish printed out on 100lbs cover stock and colour that up.

This requires that I soak the paper and tape it to a sturdy board so the paper won't wrinkle when I use watercolour on it. I'll have to do this for every one of the 39 pages and covers. Hmmm... this is still going to take a while.

So much for having it ready for Christmas. I'm still waiting to hear from the printer on a quote for having this printed and bound.

A lot of the people to whom we have shown The Wish thought that the rough drawings were good enough. Not me.

Here is a good example of why I am redoing all of the rough drawings:

I'm trying to stay true to the original version but also trying to make it... you know... better.