When Jerem approached me for the colouring part, he was very specific that there were two distinct styles needed to tell the story of the different realities. For the second part of the comic, Jerem described it as, "Like a black and white film dreaming it was in color." so I set about trying to achieve this vision.

I researched many film captures of similar scenes and mostly photographs of antique shops apart from the many that Jerem sent over as references, every one chock full of wonders and many different items from historical pasts forgotten but strangely all alike when huddled all together into one room. I noted the eerie yet comforting feel they seem to give off but more importantly, that these shops seem to appear unending as their contents sprawl into the dark recesses of their vessels; spilling over each other as if growing in number.

The other thing I had to do was look into using paintbrushes. Being more familiar with vector work, digital art using the brush was not a technique I had utilised before so it was entirely new and unknown to me. I thought about making my own brushes but instead looked around for ones that other artists had indulged in and made themselves. There are many brush creators out there so I had a very generous and large library at my disposal and boy, did i!

There wasn't really much time for experimenting as the comic needed painting and published yesterday so I had to settle for the first few brushes that I tried out, some of them were the default ones you could find in the paint package (I use Gimp for all my digital painting needs). Most of the fiddling was spent on the getting the colours right for Jerem. It took quite a few tries before we settled on this one!

Here are the progress images of the colours.



As you can see, there are slight but noticeable differences. Jerem was adamant that I paid close attention to light source highlights and lighting in general. With my usual work being mostly flat colours and 2 dimensional work, this was a challenge for me and completely new so there were plenty mistakes and a lot to learn (still working on this!) especially in terms of "telling a story" as was the medium of comics.

We couldn't afford to dwell on them too much due to time constraints but with Jerem's very clear art direction, I was able to appease sooner than later :}

One of the other major learning curve was preparing the ink and pencils Jerem provided for comic colouring; cleaning up brush strokes for inks but not necessarily the pencils (big difference), font and text needs to be legible (this took a really long time but a tale for another time), borders or no border (is that a question?), dimensions should be fixed at the start of the project (confirm with printers early on for your own sakes) and making sure all lines were the same shade of blackest black and fills to colour in were the whitest of white.

These were some of the things I did but not a complete listing as I found out later when the project forged on. Still, a marvellous experience indeed!