The Lost Worlds Of 2001: Part 1 - From Kirby's Pencils

Before I start - as usual - a few words

April is DoubtLand 3 Month

Issue 3 of “Doubt-land” is on sale now for just £1 a copy via eBay to anyone in the world

Just click the link below
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160776414580#ht_574wt_1128

In case you have been holidaying on the moon (Hey, where's my postcard?!) Doubt land is my re-envisaged version of Jim Steranko’s lost / overlooked Outland movie adaptation, which has never been reprinted in English and is very hard to get hold of and is on sale at a bargain price

Images Degrading Monthly
Both the Print and digital editions of Images Degrading Monthly are now available FREE - The Print Edition can be found at Orbital Comics and the digital version is yours - just send me a email to robin.barnard@ymail.com and I will send you a FREE copy back!

And inside this months issue we have:-

WORDS ARE PICTURES featuring some fantastic art by Jacqueline Nicholls

A review of SF SF 2 by Ryan Cecil Smith and a interview with Ryan himself

and a lot more besides!

The Lost Worlds Of 2001: Part 1 - From Kirby Pencils
Whenever I make a project there is always a rather fine balance between making something that is complimentary to the original material and being entertaining enough to justify writing about each page.

Of course the main difficulty lies in my lack of actual artistic ability, a point that has kind of been driven home fairly recently…

I did at one point fully intend to attempt (I only ever describe any of these projects as an attempt, how successful they are or not I leave to you readers to decide) to redraw Kirby's actual 2001 movie adaptation

It may be more of a surprise to confess that I actually made 2 attempts

So this is a look at those attempts and why they went wrong- in my own opinion of course!

After completing Outland one bit of advice I got from a artist was to try inking over pencils rather than just copying.  This sounded like a good idea….

But this didn't start off too well at all.

The first and most obvious problem being that the pencils for every single page did not appear to exist!

There is quite a lot of pages at the kirby museum web site http://kirbymuseum.org/gallery/v/1976+-+2001+A+Space+Odyssey/Treasury/ but equally there was a number of pages missing - So I wouldn't be able to exclusively work from pencils

Putting that problem to one side I started work on the first set of pencils there was - the inside front cover

These are kirbys pencils:-

and this is my inked version for which I did not refer to the original inks at all

I thought this was not too bad considering that this was effectively my first attempt at anything vaguely resembling inking so I carried on

The next page I attempted was the first page - these are kirbys pencils

These pencils presented some problems once I had printed them out to ink, the size of the images was too small and of fairly low quality- thus the print out contained a lot of jagged lines where there should have been curves or straight lines and any small detail was more or less demolished - also the grey came out rather muddy and destroyed yet more detail...

But still I preserved and ended up with the following:-

Which I was not in any way that happy with and a black cloud was hovering over the whole project already

Still I attempted one more page to see if things would get any better - these are Kirby's pencils

Once again if you excuse the expression the image was too degraded for me to be able to pull much detail from it, especially considering my very limited skill set and the final product below again was something I was not happy with - to put it mildly!

I knew then that this was not working and decided I needed to change direction and try a different method of drawing - so I went off and purchased the original treasury edition of 2001with just scanning the pages, printing them off and pencil tracing from these in my mind

Find out what happened with that attempt - next week!