I've just released a new limited edition fine art print (Into the Mystic, here), and wanted to share a little snapshot of the process.

At the end of last year, I started mapping out the individual drawings in rough pencil scribbles, fitting them together and filling the page. But after laying down the initial black ink outlines, I felt a bit disheartened – the ideas were too disparate, ill-fitting, not cohesive enough.

I eventually added in the first layer of colour anyway. And once the blue was across the whole page, everything locked together. (An aside: that Mint Blue marker is my new favourite thing... I'll be a loyal Posca addict forever, but that blue has convinced me to expand my marker scope).

Anyway, that's a part of the process that I should be familiar with by now. That there's always a point in any work where you're sure the whole thing just sucks and isn't going to work. But it's actually just a lapse in vision, I think. A synapse failure between what the initial, imagined idea looked like, and how the physical, real output is going to manifest.

Because once the final black layer was down, it realigned exactly as I'd imagined. It was precisely what I'd been trying to pull together, the page I had thought about at first. So, there it was... Into the Mystic.