Coloring Denis Bodart's Hellboy Cover

I am a big fan of Denis Bodart's work. This Belgian artist makes some amazing comics. He is probably best known for his Green Manor series, a series of short stories about a  Gentleman's club in nineteenth century London, with rather violent members. He has done a lot of other stuff too, but it is hard to find most of it here in Amsterdam. (I believe that apart from Green Manor and his very first comic Saint-Germain des Morts, his work has not been translated.) Luckily we are living in this digital age, where artists have blogs to share their work!

Last week there was an awesome post on Denis' blog showing a drawing of a Hellboy cover. I posted this drawing on my tumblr and mentioned that I'd love to see it colored. The next evening I started to color it myself, using Photoshop. I didn't intend to finsih it, it was just a little experiment. I have always loved Hellboy and am a real admirer of the understated coloring by Dave Stewart.

Because I had a lot of fun coloring this thing I kept going at it, even though I actually had something else I had to do. Some hours later I had done this entire mock-up of a Hellboy cover. Even though I quickly discovered that I'm really not Dave Stewart I sure had fun and learned some things in the process too.

I posted this colored cover on my tumblr and of course I dropped Tony Lariviere (the moderator of Denis' blog) a line, to inform him that I had used this image on my blog. And this morning I discover that he has actually posted it on Denis' blog! A pretty good way to start my day!  

Below is Denis Bodart's original drawing, the image above is the colored cover mock-up I did.