For the very first time, Abe Sapien goes solo in Abe Sapien: The Drowning, written by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, and featuring the haunting art of Jason Shawn Alexander!

To celebrate the launch of this new miniseries, Dark Horse is offering a special incentive only available to Direct Market Retailers--a signed Abe Sapien: The Drowning lithograph, featuring an exclusive oil painting from artist Jason Shawn Alexander. Make sure to ask your favorite local retailer for more details.

Jason was good enough to document the evolution of this beatiful painting and send us some pictures. He also provided us with a little artistic insight into the creative process of bringing his painting to life. Take it away, Jason!

Painting comes as very time consuming work for me. For this lithograph painting, it took a while for me to figure out what image of Abe Sapien I really wanted to do, so I even started out of the gate quite a bit late. In a conversation with Scott Allie, we decided to use a photo of the painting for it's solicitation ad to give people an idea of what they would get. Much like my line art, the differences from the pencils to the inks are VAST. But I thought the initial picture was a good interpretation. It also gave me the idea to take more pictures as I went along.

So, this is how I started out with this piece: mostly as a drawing with the oil paint. The tone on Abe (in this picture) was done on the computer for the ad. I did that so he would stand out in the drawing.


Alright. Time to get serious. I wanted to do this painting a bit more traditional. More old school. Laying down all the tones and shapes with the intention of glazing in the color in the end. Using cool blacks for the octopus and warmer ones for Abe to provide some depth.


Once I was fairly happy with the sculpting of the forms, it was time to start throwing in color. Make the thing pop. And then I realized, drawing Abe's face in two dimensions was very different than painting and really making those features
real . . . trouble ahead.

Really starting to glaze in tones and more colors, here. Still working on the octopus and trying to figure out how I want to portray Abe, mostly in the face. He went through a few changes.

By this point I had started drinking a lot and yelling at the painting as well as loved ones . . . kidding. I was struggling for a bit and decided to refocus more on the octopus.


Abe is a great, and unique character. Not a badass and not a candy-ass either. I laid out the final octopus and really fleshed out Abe and spent a long time on his head and face. I like this one. Strong with a little humility. I'm not a graphic artist. I spend all my time on the expression and emotion of a figure. That's what's important to me as an artist and a viewer. I think I got him.




Here we go. I went in and tweaked a little bit of color on the computer to make things pop more. I'm a fairly subdued painter when it comes to color. I desaturate everything. But Abe and his world wouldn't allow that. So I just popped some color up on the computer. The prior images are photos, but the final image is a scan, done on my large format Epson scanner in eight passes (the original piece is 30"x 40" on canvas) and built the image back in Photoshop.

There you go. Now I truly am going to go have that drink . . . or three . . . cheers.

-Jason Shawn Alexander