I love the framing of this page; so simple but effective. The look on Jim's face, full of pencil scratches, is a fascinating contrast to the calm in the previous pages leading up to it.

Horror invokes a specific human emotion that is not so commonly exorcised in my daily rituals, that adrenaline rush when I'm inundated with ennui. And with the usual busy-ness of everything that one faces, it becomes a welcoming retreat piercing through the veil of the everyday. I particular like a certain type of horror - one that involves creatures and preferably peppered with (very) dark humour with lashings of science fiction. This combination of horror is very specific so when I find it, it gets lapped up pretty voraciously with finger hovering over the repeat button.

When the monstrosity above appeared to me on the page, I got both very excited and annoyed. There it was, tearing out of the page waiting to unleash whatever fearful intentions it has been written to do and there I was with the tether, holding what felt to me was the potential to either let it fulfil those promises or outright destroy any credibility it could have as the fearsome thing it should be.

I pussyfooted about with the colours; carefully colouring within the confines of the box and page, totally ignoring my previous revelations about preciousness. There was also this niggling concern if I could erase, replace or colour over any bit of inking that Jerem had done. The pages I received had to be cleaned up even more to get the pristine and high contrast base it needed to be before any colours could be added. This involved meticulous zooming in and fine erasing of any pencil marks not intended to be there and leaving the ones that should. All pencil marks were then turned into ink and had to retain the same degree of black and white throughout all pages which were then resized to make sure they aligned the same in terms of margin from the edges and that they were ultimately, the same dimensions for the printers.

I suppose you could say I got precious about colouring after all that work!

In any case, there were inks that Jerem had specifically wanted to retain to convey the story and I came in as another layer and made my mark with my own interpretation of what that story was and I did not want it to end up as a case of too many cooks spoiling the soup.

And so I researched tonnes of Giger on how to approach this page. I remember Jerem stressing that I go RED all the way for this piece and it took several tries of trying steel blues and other hues before returning to crimson, mostly to compare and contrast the options. You never know until you try. In the end, after many re-colourings, I literally splashed out with new brushes and filters, colouring out of the confines of Jerem's inks to the point where I probably got carried away in the later pages.