The Garden, redrawn before its time

One of the tricky things about my comics “career” is that I am still trying to figure out how I want to draw… Case in point: I have had the basic outlines of my first longish (90-100 pages) comic, “the Garden,” in mind for years now, but I had been putting off getting started until I had more of the narrative particulars down… but about a year ago I was like “Fuck it” and dove right into the thing, figuring that i would be able to piece together those story details as i went forward (I’m still working on those, no surprise).

I liked my pacing, and the sort of more cartoony character design I had come up with for the story. But, when I started drawing the Prologue, I was illustrating it in this somewhat scritchy-scratchy cross-hatchy style which I was playing with then… I guess the main reason was that I wanted it to look a bit old-timey, and to contrast with my other project which I was also drawing at the time, “Territorial Pissings” (which has also landed in comics purgatory in the last year… sigh). However, after completing about eight pages in that cross-hatched style, I began to look at the pages with utter dread… I didn’t want to finish out the remaining pages of the Prologue in this style, much less the entire book.

And so, with great trepedation, I began experimenting with redrawing the first couple of pages in a modified style… drawing the blacks with a brush (which I feel much more comfortable and expressive with), and filling in the mid-tones with a grey Pitt brush pen, which I had also done with “Schooled,” a recent comic I did for John Issacson’s transit anthology… For most of the marks, I found the brush pen was a neat and simple way to insert that second tone, easier than doing an ink wash. However, it was nearly impossible to achieve a nice solid block for the word balloons, etc.

Here is the page after I have played around in Photoshop for awhile… I was able to separate the tones (thank God for the threshold tool), and to clarify the grey layer into a solid block of color, eliminating the various grades in the original drawing (I also cleaned up the first four panels with the Hoepoe bird alighting on the branch, where an inadvertent “figure/ground” problem had arisen when i introduced the grey). Tho’ I wouldn’t want to do this for everything I draw (I like my little mistakes and sloppiness, truth be told), I like the effect here… it feels modern and old, but still hand-crafted. It feel professional to me.

I’m feeling a bit silly for revisiting these pages, which will certainly delay the publication of the first few chapters of “The Garden” in the next issue of Friends, number four. But, I really do think that I like these newer drawings. This being my longest work to date, and with over two years since my last issue, I’m feeling a need to bring my most professional A-game to the process. Hopefully I’ll be able to resist any temptation to further revise the newer pages before the story is all finished!