Son Of Origins Gene Ha cover restoration

This is another piece I was hired to restore. It was both a simple and a complex piece. The logo and text restoration was pretty standard - I digitally captured the text from the published book cover, removed the color, sharpened and resized everything. The result was printed on color matched, stat-like paper. The tricky part was the top part of the cover. You can see that the art ends there and the whole top is full of unsightly scribbling...hardly desirable for framing! On the published book cover, the color artist simulated the buildings in the background with blocks and blobs of color behind the lettering. My task was to simulate what the coloring had done which was consistent with the black and white art, yet retained the feel of the finished color piece. My solution was to create a color matched piece of art which I very lightly tacked down to cover the area full of handwriting. It bridges the art area with the blank area behind the lettering and replicates the look of the published cover... and it covers up all that nasty looking writing! I then placed a sheet of clear acetate over the art and pasted down the logo and lettering so the background would show through between the logo letters. The piece is now displayable in it's complete stage (image three), without the logo, etc, just by flipping up the sheet of acetate (image two), or even in it's original form, as the added piece of art is easily removable (though I don't know why anyone would want to!).

(James is available for hire to replace missing logos and lettering on comic book and comic strip art and to do cover re-creations and commissions. Please contact him with any questions or for a price quote. If you wish the restoration work to be private, upon your request, no images will be used in James’ public galleries.)