The North-West Watcher
- THE NORTH-WEST WATCHER - A black ink and gray pencil drawing on an 11 x 14 size Vellum paper. It appears in the book, "The Dream of X," by William Hope Hodgson, published by Donald Grant in 1977. It also appears in the book, "Masters of the Weird Tale: Hodgson," published by Centipede Press in 2009.
A very weird thing happened with this project, I drew each picture using black and gray color pencils, and after I finished each picture I sprayed it with "fix-a-tif" to give it a protective coating. When I had about half the drawings done I noticed that the first few were becoming tinted with color, all by themselves. And when all the drawings were finished they had mysteriously become beautifully tinted with color, as you see here. Hard to believe!
I could think of nothing to do about the added colors, in fact I really liked the strange hues they now had. So I mailed them to Grant and waited for the book to be published. After the book was published and I got my complimentary copies, I was really pleased with the results but I was also a bit perplexed about what made the drawings take on those colors?
When the publisher returned my drawings I stored them in a drawer. A few months later I received a call from an art collector who wanted to buy them, but when I took them out of the drawer I was shocked to see that the magic colors were gone, the drawings were all back to being gray toned. I told the buyer what happened and I have no idea of what he thought about my strange story, but he bought them anyway. The strange thing is that this phenomenon never happened with previous drawings that I had sprayed, and it has never happened again. Somehow, that one spray can that I used on those drawings had that magic ingrediant that tinted them, temporarily. How strange is that?
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