Keeping It Fresh

One of my rough drawings - it ain't correct, but it sure is "bouncy"

It must be a good six years ago now, that I was visiting Gary Erskine, and showed him the work I'd done on my personal project, City of Night (still in progress, for those of you who remember it!). At the time I had the whole 32 pages laid out as lettered rough drawings; Gary briefly flicked through it and then said, "you should publish it like this."

I can kind of see what he meant; though I'd not be happy asking anyone to pay money for my rough pencils, there is a spontaneity, a sort of "bounciness" present in my roughs that gets lost in the finished work. It set me thinking on ways to preserve that life; thoughts that didn't really start to bear fruit until I was working on War Of The Worlds, when pages had to be bashed out at such a rate that I could no longer be precious about what I was doing. The streamlined inking process I developed late in The Great Game took me one step closer to my goal.

Another influence has been seeing the proper version of Kingdom Of The Wicked in print at last; though some of the drawing in that is really too careless, it comes from a period when I wasn't using rigid perspective, and my work had that sort of "bounce" to it that isn't present in the later stuff...

So with that in mind, I've let go of the tight perspective grids I've been using these last ten years, and am "winging it" - trusting that my natural perspective will carry me through, and a little but of incorrectness will just add life to the mix. It all feels a wee bit scary, but it's also great fun...