I got a new scanner for Christmas! My old one was dying and producing lines through the art. It was less noticeable with black and white art, and could be painted out with Photoshop. But colour was no longer possible.

Theold scanner was a Canon Lide 50, which I really liked. The new one is a Lide 100, much the same but with new software. It's been installed and I've tested it out. It works much smoother than the old scanner, producing really high quality images. For the test I picked four old colour pieces from 1985 that I had never scanned.

The first I'll post is this one. It's from back in the days when Giants walked the Earth, and also Jerry Collins. We used to do pastiches and knock-offs of each other's characters before he went off the deep end on me. I altered photocopies of the orignal art I did for future publications, but there was nothing I could do about the coloured pieces. Tkhey were never printed, and this is the first time they've been on-line. Jerry would probably say I should have burned them, but nuts to that. They've been out of circulation for nearly 25 years, that's enough.

The work was done entirely with colour pencils. There was no Photoshop then. There weren't any home computers that could run Photoshop 1.0 even. So how do you do something like this with colour pencils? Very carefully, and you take an insane amount of time. But I always thought it was worth it.

A few years later I was selling hand coloured work at furry cons. But prices were low and I fell into the habit of rushing the work, and doing simpler images. No one wanted to pay $100 or $200 for something like this then, and I doubt many would now. But even in 1985 that was cheap for something that took a week to colour.

I did eventually colour one of the altered xeroxes of this, but by comparison the colours are not as rich, and the line work was predictably coarsened by the photocopy of what was already a photocopy. This version is as it was intended to be, and is by far the superior.