Another art day. With making these books it is the pleasure of working with artists, like Gary Gianni, that really satisfies me as a creator/designer, just seeing how they make a picture work. This is rarely shown to people who see just a finished book, but I think is really cool!
This is one of the four new illustrations that Gary has done for ‘The Adventure of the Creeping Man’ by Arthur Conan Doyle, the story that inspired Neil Gaiman to write his Holmes story, ‘The Case of Death and Honey’. This image didn’t go through some of the radical changes that some of the others required, we always wanted a ‘classic’ Holmes image with Watson, and what was better than Holmes telling Watson, what was what.
What I like about this series of images is that you can see how Gary decides the composition in a thumbnail then light and dark values in the more formed drawing, then he decides what the room would look like without those values, firming up the image detail, then, which you can see with the final illustration where he combines the two, both the light and dark values and the details. Letterpress printing is like photographic woodblocks done on photopolymer plates, so Phil Abel from Hand and Eye Editions, Arete publisher, had to do loads of tests to make all the details come through, God bless him, it was a long process.
