I posted a few photos from my huge binder of original Penny Arcade art over on my Bluesky account and it turned into a fun thread where I ended up redrawing some of that old artwork in my current style. For those of you consuming media of the social variety I’ll post it here:
Like the post says, back in 1998 I sketched out the comics with a pencil and then inked them with Micron pens. I had a big 11×17 flatbed scanner I used to get the artwork into my PC and then I used early versions of CorelDraw and Photoshop to do the coloring.
When I started drawing the strip in 1998 I sketched in pencil, inked with micron pens and then scanned the artwork to color digitally. All that original art is in a big binder. It’s wild to crack open occasionally.
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— Gabe (@cwgabriel.bsky.social) June 3, 2025 at 9:39 AM
Jovi mentioned wanting to see some of these old drawings done in my current style and I thought it sounded like fun. Here’s my modern take on an old piece.
This was a fun idea!
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— Gabe (@cwgabriel.bsky.social) June 3, 2025 at 2:02 PM
It’s also worth mentioning that The original art from ‘98 probably took me close to 4 hours just to pencil and then ink. On the other hand, I did this drawing of Gabe and Tycho today in less than 20 min. It reminds me of an incredible story about a painter named James McNeill Whistler (you probably know his mom), who was asked by a lawyer in 1878 about the high price he had set for a painting that had only taken him two days to create.
“Oh, two days! The labour of two days, then, is that for which you ask two hundred guineas!”
“No;—I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.”
-Gabe Out