Art Swap: Angry Dredd

Here's another of those art swaps, this time for Conor Boyle, who wanted "a suitably annoyed Dredd".


In return, he's done a fabulous version of Halo Jones - my all time favourite female 2000ad character!


If anyone out there would like a sketch similar to those I've done for my Fractal Friction buddies, you only need ask. I'll do A4 sketches of this kind for the bargain hunt price of £15*. Times are tight, paying jobs are scarce and the concept of an arts grant is laughable, so consider it a form of sponsorship, you could even commission me for something a bit bigger...

* inc p&p for UK, leave a comment or send me an e-mail with your request.

PS. I've had some lovely comments recently - I don't tend to comment on my own posts or other people's comments, but I do appreciate them, so I would just like to thank all those who've been here recently and left such encouraging remarks. You're all superstars, cheers!

Art Swap: Aimee Nixon

This one was done for Chris Askham, who simply asked for a female 2000AD character... Who to choose? Halo Jones, DeMarco, Venus Bluegenes, Niamh? A plethora of sexy maidens were before me to choose from... so who did I choose? Yep, the hard nut resident of the lowlife and wally squad Judge, Aimee Nixon, who you'd want to be careful to ever describe as sexy, but is still one of my favourite female characters of recent years.


In return, Chris did this top notch piece of Judge Anderson for me.

Sketchup Lawmaster

I've known about Google sketchup for a while and I've done nothing about learning how to use it, despite having heard pretty good things... that changed last week when I saw an amazing job that Richard Smith did using it to model a spaceship called the Terrapin (see Richard's website for more of his illustration work). The Terrapin is for a strip he is working on for a forthcoming issue of FutureQuake and looks awesome and I was inspired to learn more!


After asking Richard whether he thought it was worth learning how to use Sketchup, (a resounding yes), I decided I would spend a bit of time trying to get to grips with it. There are some limitations but I managed to build Judge Dredd's Lawmaster (his bike) and I'm not unhappy with the results... I will build a few other things and hopefully it will help greatly with that Dredd strip I'm doing for Zarjaz with Lee Robson.


I have to say, I'm thoroughly impressed with sketchup and for a FREE and EASY 3D package I can see no downside, especially when you can export animations that you can use to show others around the models you have built. So, can I recommend it? On Monday I had no idea how to create things in 3D that I could then use to plan scenes and things... and now I have a new and powerful tool in my skill set! So, I can strongly recommend it, well worth the time spent I think!