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!