I think this was also the first page all drawn on the same surface. A bit of explanation about my unorthodox working methods during that time. At the time, I was a full-time greeting card artist. I would sketch out a card roughly on tissue paper (not even Vellum, just tissue). I’d slip that under the top sheet of my tissue pad, and trace a “tight” pencil drawing. I’d slip THAT under the top page of the tissue pad, and ink it. I’d then photostat the line art, and color the stat with Dr. Martin’s dyes to create the finished art.

I did DD,DD the same way (except for the color part). All the finished Dick Duck originals are on tissue paper. Not having mastered (or even attempted) inking with a brush at this time, I inked all my art with Rapidograph technical pens, using #00 up to #2, usually. I’d create “thick to thin” by building up the pen lines.

The really weird thing was that for the first few DDs, I was not convinced that if I tried doing the entire page in one go I wouldn’t end up ruining it, so to avoid being my own undoing, I inked only one panel at a time, on individual sheets, the statting them and creating my “finished” page by pasting up a bunch of individual panel stats on one sheet. After a couple, I felt confident enough to just ink the whole page, so even if my originals weren’t on a nice piece of board, they were all of a piece.

As seen last week, Pavlov attended Chicago Cons. Here he looks on as Engel & Fiala have a Bill Gaines photo op in The Buyer’s Guide. (Gaines’ “daughter” turned out to be his “lady”)