I love pulp. Now, that may not come as a big suprise to many of you, but along with the fun, action-packed stories, the art was something that really inspired me. Especially the covers.
So, I worked and worked on my art, trying to come up with something that was fitting, illustratively, and paid sufficient homage to what I saw as a pulp style, and it worked.
Sort of.
I mean, I really enjoyed the strong graphic blacks in my work, and adding the marker greytones punched it out a little farther…giving the the flexibility to really describe an image.
But I always, ALWAYS fell short in the color area.
It was so frustrating to me to see gorgeous pieces of pulp art by classic artists like Bama, Basil Gogos, and others, and amazing color pieces by Douglas Klauba, Steve Hickman, Adam Hughes……and to personally experience failure after failure with color personally.
Well, suddenly..about a week ago, everything changed. I experienced an epiphany in Photoshop that suddenly changed everything. Suddenly, not only could I color my own work, but I was pretty damned happy with it!
It’s hard to explain to someone what that’s like. It’s like being able to write music but not being able to play an instrument, only to come along one day, pick up a cello and experience that “oh..I get it!” moment that takes you from a floundering failure to compentent. Just like that.
So, instead of having a page of the Vigilante Crypt here for display, I have a couple of color pieces that I’ve done that I feel turned out pretty well (I’m still keeping the colored GZ print under my hat until next week, though). The first is a piece for Anthony Schiavino’s story “Cowboy Tony and the Savage Chimps of Cannibla Mesas!”, which is just as over-the-top fun as it sounds. The second is a colored version of an earlier piece I did to pay homage to one of my favorite pulp characters Captain Spectre, created by my good friend Tom Floyd.
Anyway, this is a whole new world for my art, and I’m really looking forward to exploring it!
Good stuff, Dave. Congrats on finding your color-skills. Those are really awesome, and I can’t wait to see GZ in color!
You solved the riddle of color! Good for you. Love to see your contiual progress - more leaps and more bounds buddy. Bravo!
Maybe C.T. should be in color!
Fantastic work man. You continue to amaze me. When you go in leaps and bounds in more so how far the Hulk flies than just your normal guy on the street.
let me guess, color overlay?
“let me guess, color overlay?”
Yes! Yep, that was it.
Oh, and adjustment layers.
And channel selections.
And lighting filters.
And texture layers.
And digital shading and highlighting.
And…
Ah, let’s just say photoshop.