Month: January 2017

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Gotham Nights

Duane commissioned me to ink Joel Gomez’s pencil drawing ‘Gotham Nights’:
He supplied me with the original pencil drawing and a print. He expressed a preference to keep the original pencil drawing intact, if possible. We discussed inking the print, but it was kind of dark and muddy. I had suggested making a lighter print of my own and ink that.
But then I decided to try something different… and do something the same way.
I used the original pencil drawing under a piece of Canson Bristol (my current favourite for drawing/inking) and put it on a light table. I was able to ink directly from what I could see of the pencils through the Bristol and used the print as a reference for the areas that were hard to see. That saved me from having to make a print that I would ink over and enabled me to use my preferred paper.
It was a very interesting process.
I had just finished the ‘Monkshood’ commission a couple weeks ago and decided that ‘Gotham Nights’ would benefit from the same sort of treatment. If I had inked on top of the original pencils, I probably would have done it completely differently and tried to keep closer to the original. But I figured Duane wanted me to ‘Gerhard-it-up’ (which usually means thousands upon thousands of tiny little lines) and I wanted to make it look more like night-time as well as try to give a sense of depth. I used a light grey wash on the sky and on the foreground buildings to enhance the effect.
Ta-da!
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Don, Steve and $crooge

I got this email the other day:

“Hi Ger –

Hope you’re all doing well, welcome to 2017!

Don Rosa was in Albuquerque this weekend and I brought in the Yukon $crooge commission,

he was quite taken with how you finished out the background.

Thanks again and I’ll be in touch eventually!

Steve”

Thanks Steve…Way Cool!

Look forward to the next commission.

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“Monkshood” commission

Here is, in part, the description I received for this commission:

“Perhaps the best way to describe my project is a modern-day Dracula meets Arkham Asylum, but done in a way that represents people with mental illnesses, particularly those who have been found by the courts to be Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity. The main setting of my story is “Monkshood,” a forensic psychiatric hospital complex comprised of neighboring buildings from Dracula lore: Seward Sanitarium and Carfax Abbey, and influenced by real-world Broadmoor Hospital in the UK. Monkshood… should be a character in and of itself.”

So with that in mind I came up with this layout:

This seemed too wide and panoramic, so I cropped it down a bit:

This didn’t look sinister enough, so I changed the angle and moved some buildings around:

Then I did a mock-up on the computer of the shading:

And then it was a matter of drawing it full size:

This is as far as I got before Christmas (so close!):

Here is the completed piece:

Here are some close-ups:

Ta-da!

Okay…what’s next?

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2016 cons ‘n’ commissions

Here’s a little movie compiling all of the con and commissions from 2016:

Wishing all of you the best for 2017.

***

Here is our schedule so far for this year:

March 2 – 5… Emerald City Comicon… Seattle WA
March 17 – 19… Toronto ComiCon… Canada
April 14 – 16… Indiana Comic Con… Indianapolis
April 29 – 30… East Coast Comicon… Secaucus NJ
May 19 – 21… Motor City Comic Con… Novi MI
June 16 – 18… Heroes Convention… Charlotte NC
September 8 – 10… Wizard World… Nashville TN
September 22 – 24 – Hal-Con… Halifax NS Canada