A Distant Soil by Colleen Doran

As some of you may recall, I had the privilege of going back to my work on an issue of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman to recreate the ink art over my old pencils. The original inks did not compliment my pencil art very well. We all thought it would be best to allow me to re-ink my pages for the Absolute Sandman II collection.

Ideally, I would have been able to ink directly over copies of all of my pencil art, but only three copies survived a flood in my studio. So, I re-inked the art on blue lines. Blue lines are copies of the pages printed in non-photo blue ink. The printer cannot see the blue lines. I simply inked directly on top of the blue art, doing my best to recreate the pictures as originally drawn.

The lettering appears on the original art in little blue lines as well. I simply drew around the word balloons. The final lettering was dropped in mechanically later.

I later sold most of the original art, with blue lettering remaining as is. One customer, Wei Shawn Low, asked me to go in and redo the lettering (for a fee, of course). It turned out to be an interesting learning experience.

Now that almost no one is doing lettering by hand these days, I doubt most people would be interested in this exercise. But tracing over Todd Klein’s letters forced me to think about the letters as shapes. I had to consider his style of spacing and his form, and I really enjoyed this. I tried lettering some words out of order to force me to concentrate solely on the letters as line and curve. It was interesting to sense how different his letters felt under my hand.

Todd Klein has a detailed discussion of his work on Sandman here. Check it out!

PS: Forgive the delay in answering mail and approving posts. Lousy weather and my satellite is behaving very ill. This is the third time I have tried to upload this post!