Hotel In The Woods.

The work I had plan for this week kind of fell through, so I thought I’d use the time to colour up the cover artwork for the forth issue. I’m not the world’s greatest colourist, but hopefully I’ve got to a point where if you walked into a comic-shop, and saw my covers on the shelf, it wouldn’t offend the eye. I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve when it comes to colouring… only problem is, it feels like most people now have millions of tricks up their sleeve when it comes to computer colouring. I could go with the theory that most modern artwork is overproduced. There’s so many filters and textures going on, it’s just noise after a while. There was maybe some line artwork there at some point, but now it’s just buried under a ton of lens flair and garish colour. But that said, I’m very jealous when I see artwork by someone who really knows what they’re doing on a computer. I know I’ll never be a pioneer of the digital age, which this now is. My only aim now is just not to suck at colouring, which hopefully I don’t.

I’m very aware that I’m trying to master line artwork, in an age where line artwork is more-and-more disappearing. I spent eight or nine years inking, before something clicked, and I felt I was really starting to do something interesting with my inks, and now technology has made the act and art of inking obsolete. Thanks a lot, technology, you DICK. It’s going to weird to see how that all plays out in the future of comics.

Anyway, here’s the colour version of this cover. I recently got really bored of drawing humans (as that’s all you draw as a comic book artist) and wondered if I could be outrageous and draw a cover with no people on it. Something you rarely see. This is where I ended up with that thought. A hotel and a corpse as the cover stars. One nice surprise I didn’t bank on, was that not having anybody on the front adds a bit of creepiness to it. No one to relate to as a reader. It’s probably the one out of the four that must looks like a horror comic cover. I’d like to think there’s a bit of Richard Corben going on in this shot (but that might just be wishful thinking on my part.) Being the forth and final cover, and being the one to round off this mini-series, I guess it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to save the scariest till last. I had planned to really make the corpse look really rotten and wrinkly in the colour stage, but playing around with it, I thought it looked better with a kind of bleached feel going on. I wanted Blake to have a rotting fruit look about him, but no matter which way I played it, it just looked wrong. Bleached Blake pops a lot better, I think. He’s too small on the cover to do much with him. When I tried to wrinkle him up, he just looked like a dark shape with no features after a while.

Looking at this cover now… hmmmm…needs more lens flair.