Thursday, February 10, 2011

Recreating Szaza's lost moly

There was a pleasant surprise over on my internet friend, Samantha Zaza’s blog the other day. She posted a new entry in a moly_x book for a group we were in together, Group #64 which had flickered out of existence before ever really taking off back in 2009.

Szaza’s own moly for that group had been lost in transit somewhere between Australia and Mexico. It was a real shame because she had made a really beautiful first entry in what was intended to become a “narrative corpse” comic. So, I decided to recreate her book as best as I could. Here's a step by step guide.

#1: I bought a new Japanese accordion-fold moleskine and printed out copies of Z’s original artwork (it took a few tries to get it to the proper scale) on 2 sheets of regular printer paper.


#2: Cropping the paper down to the dimensions of the book I used a 6B pencil to cover the backside of the first few images (I only did a couple images at a time in order to minimize smudging).


#3: Taping the artwork in place I proceeded to trace the image. This transferred the graphite from the back of the page to the book.


#4: Removing the artwork we can see the faint image that has been transferred. I then darkened this up with a 2H pencil.

#5: Here I repeated the procedure for #3 and #4 until the entire image was transferred.


Now to see if I can talk Szaza into restarting this languishing group! I think I’ll do an entry and send it back to her to let her re-paint her entry.

You can check out the original over on Samantha’s flickrstream.