Today I’m going to take a look at a recent “Dreams of Things” and write about it. I’ve got cover #293 out that I did back on July 7, 2025. This is an ink and marker drawing that is part of my “Covers to comic books that don’t exist” series. Of course the covers exist because I’ve drawn them but the rest of the comic book doesn’t exist.
The purpose of this series of drawings is to create an image that looks like a dream world. It’s a world that I can look around and find meaning in. The drawings are about the search for meaning.
This one, like almost all the others, started as a small drawing in my inkbook. That’s a sketchbook in which I make small spontaneous drawings. The drawings are all done off the top of my head with no forethought in a Surrealist Automatic Drawing method. I never know what is going to come out under my pen.
These days I set up about six to ten drawings at a time. First I look through one of my completed Inkbooks to find a small drawing that I like and then I print that drawing out in blue line on a 6×9 inch piece of drawing paper (Bristol board). I like to do this multiple times so that I have a bunch of drawings to choose from. After I get down to only a couple of choices I set up a bunch more.
After that I draw right over the blue line and make a finished 6×9 inch drawing. That then gets scanned and made into a digital file. I blow up the drawing to 10×15 inches and print that out in blue line after putting the logos and trade dress on the digital file. The logo and trade dress gets printed out (in black) along with the blue line drawing on an 11×17 inch piece of paper.
The next step is to ink the drawing and after that I break out my markers and color it.
All of these covers are strange. That’s their point after all. They’re all trying to be strange and dream-like. But this one seems especially weird to me. It’s probably because the main figure doesn’t have an actual head. Instead she has a giant eye where the bottom half of the head should be. It seems to be extra strange because of the eye’s placement. It would be more normal if the giant eye was on a head but there is no head altogether. Crazy.
The only two faces in this drawing are the two stone faces on either side. I put them there to humanize the drawing. I love drawing faces and most of these “Dreams of Things” covers have big faces in them but this one didn’t. The main character has no face and the two small cartoon figures up top also have blank faces. To make up for that I drew two faces into the architecture. That gives me a little bit of humanity to ground myself in as a viewer.
The first color that strikes me when looking at this is the yellow that surrounds the main figure. The yellow creates a sort of face and vase illusion because at the bottom it’s clearly outside the figure but as the eye follows it up the yellow gets contained inside the figure as it transitions to the building-like structure on top. Space bends a little bit from the top to the bottom.
The figure is also drawn in ink with my side of the brush technique so that the line is chunky with bumps in it rather than being smooth as I usually draw. To compliment that the marker color is laid down with a scumbling technique where it is put on in small chunks that don’t blend together smoothly. This gives the figure an overall texture.
I also notice that I added to the texture by using one of my new ink markers. The markers I usually use are dye based but the marker I used for the dark blue in the collar are is a pigment based blue ink marker. It goes down with a slight texture. There is a little more of a pebble to that area. I think it looks nice.
There are also three distinct areas of background in this one. The bottom part is filled with rectangles. I like to use geometric shapes in general and often I use them with Modernist Mondrian-like primary colors but here I used all browns. I think that makes the rectangles look like wood and it gives the drawing a grounded feel. It’s heavy down the bottom and keeps it down to earth.
Then we get the orange clouds. They pair well with the overall blue of the main figure. They offer contrast to the blue and separate the space nicely. The fact that they are dark on the bottom and get lighter as they go up connects the ground to the sky.
The sky is a triple blue texture. Three color markers were used to make it. The dark blue has some red in it so it stands apart from the blue of the figure.
There are some purple architectural elements on the sides that hold up the two small figure and I think that purple is what pulls all the color together. It gives the drawing a bit of life so that it’s not just blue versus orange.
Finally there are those two small Mod Man figures on the top. Mod Man is short for modular and modern and is the name I have for these multi-color simplified triangle figure drawings. Usually they are a little bigger and more complex than these but I kept it super simple here. They are mostly for scale and make everything on the page look big. One is even taller than the other. That bends the space at the top a little as my eye tries to even them up. That twisting of space makes things more dream-like to me.
That’s my look at a recent “Dreams of Things.” Keep dreaming and drawing.