Pepping It Up

Final art then for the much pimped Tyranny Rex commission:


Sometimes I go to silly lengths for effect. Rob asked for an in joke - the script for Phase V of Zenith... Grant Morrison wrote four books of Zenith, so-called phases, but I doubt there will ever be a fifth. You can only just see it in the final piece, and it took about half an hour of fiddling to get it right - D'Oh! I'm not even going to mention how long it took to find reference for the Our Price bag.


Finally on this, for the process completists amongst you - here are the final inks too.


I'm available for commissions like this and the Dredd piece I did earlier in the year. please feel free to contact me via the e-mail address in the sidebar for a quote.

Very Complimentary

Well, I've just received a couple of comp copies of two publications I've got work in...


As previously blogged, I've got 'The Squadron' in Sci-Fi Art Now, a thumping good coffee table style book crammed with fantastic pieces of art from some seriously impressive names. You can also read about my process for that piece here from earlier in the year.
Sci-Fi Art Now is available from all good bookshops and on amazon still for the bargain price of £13.99

The other illustration is for a story called 'Stone' by Neil Beynon in the British Fantasy Award winning anthology title Murky Depths.


Please order your copy of Murky Depths #14 here.

The Red Dragon

Page 33 of Fractal Friction is up.


It features a massive Red Dragon... you know what to do!

Alas, Poor Yorick!

Here's a panel from something I've been working on... I've edited it (a bit) so as not to give the game away too much (I hope).


I've tried to use black more on this... I was just experimenting really, but moody was the order of the day so, I wanted to at least have some hatching and areas of 'spotted' blacks.

'Her' Again

Rough pencils:


Rougher still:


Rough as a bag of sand paper:


I was running out of time when I was working on the pencils and had to rush these roughs somewhat... I doubt anyone would have been able to ink these for me, there was a substantial amount of tightening up before I went to inks.

There was a slight change of plan with page one, panel four, after the Emperor made a suggestion about the two "heroes" perhaps falling together. Originally I'd conceived of a situation where the beheaded guy's head was resting between his legs, but I think the reworked version is so much more successful as it allowed for the head to still be looking at Her... even in death, he is besotted with Her!

Inks:




There is much to be happy about with these pages, although one thing stands out to me as needing some work, page two, panel one, is a little unclear what is going on, scale is also an issue - if I'm honest this was a problem panel. If I was tackling it again I would probably eliminate the whale, it's not really earning its keep and in a creature heavy page, some sort of funky raft might be funnier...

It was a pretty quick turnaround, I completed all the art in pretty quick time, so I won't beat myself up too much over one slightly dodgy panel and a couple of inconsistencies.

Kerayzee G-Raff

Matt and Phil have done their versions of the Giraffe in our not-so-regular warping of various creatures.
Here's my effort - a quick sketch with an almost alien vibe, but it feels too similar to our existing Earth species to really qualify as 'twisted'... Giraffe, or JarJar, you decide...


In other news, a thread was started about me on the 2000ad forum... I'm touched and humbled by some very kind comments that I shall endeavour to deserve!

Showing a Bit of Leg!

John Freeman (down the tubes and much more besides) has a book in the works called Sci-Fi Art Now and he has requested submissions for it. I decided it was worth taking my sketched concept from last week to a finished piece for this project.


Here is a little teaser (so to speak) for the final piece I have submitted. It's a great brief and I really enjoyed putting this together, I just hope John likes my submission!

Hubba Hubba Hubba!

Quick sketch for a project I'm thinking of submitting something to. It depends whether I can make this concept work as to whether I bother or not. What you've got here is a B-movie sci-fi spoof, a silly alien monster, and a sexy astronaut lady.


What more could you want? That's a rhetorical question by the way!

I'm thinking of having it as a B-Movie poster like this one from all the way back when I started this blog (my second ever post).

2000AD Advent Calendar

Over on the 2000AD forums a really great idea was put forward by Pete Wells of the 2000AD covers uncovered blog fame - each day during December, one or more board member will post something into an "advent calendar" topic. Pete has already posted his 1st December Judge Dredd X-mas movie epic and I'm certainly excited to see what else is in store... here is my effort for today's door!


I thought I'd celebrate one of my favourite new stories of 2009 - the terrific Zombo created by Henry Flint and written by Al Ewing.

V&A Illustration awards

I've entered the V&A Illustration Awards 2010 with the work I produced for Cambridge University Press. The work was for a couple of books published earlier in the year, but I have only entered with illustrations done for Tales of Terror.


My entries can be found here. It's all very exciting. Fingers crossed for me everyone!

The reason I entered was a twitter post I saw made by Dave Gibbons. Now, I'm not wholly sure I like twitter, but without it, I doubt I'd have entered...

A Little Joker

If you've been paying attention, you might remember the Harley Quinn I did a while ago as a guest post on Scotch Corner.
I'm working on a (sort of) companion piece and this is an element that I've produced based on an old ink sketch I did circa July 2002.


No prizes for guessing the subject of the new piece... it wasn't something I was planning on, but a sketch I did yesterday afternoon grabbed my attention and seemed a really good way to properly kick-start the back-to-work discipline I need.

Judge Dredd and Tweak

One of my all time favourite Dredd world characters appeared during Judge Dredd's first epic adventure The Cursed Earth which ran way back in progs 61-85 over thirty years ago. The character was Tweak, an alien who ate rocks and read minds...


There is a scene where Tweak looks like he is about to crush Dredd's head like a melon in a vice - but he is simply reading Dredd, to see if he can be trusted.

Poison Ivy

If all things have gone according to plan, then blogger will have automatically posted this in absentia.
You may remember a while ago, I posted about a cool blog called covered where the idea is that you rework a classic comic cover in your own style... again, if things have gone according to schedule, then my version of Batman 181 should be visible on Robert Goodin's covered blog right now! So, I'm now free to reveal to you good folk the full image...


Here again, for reference, is my copy of the original cover from June 1966 with art by Infantino and Anderson.


Remember to cross your fingers for me today, as I'm at the Birmingham International Comics' Convention and I'll be trying to meet up with editors and professionals who might be able to help me onto the all important first rung of the professional ladder!

Zarjaz 08

Way back in February, I did this warm-up piece for a strip I was going to be doing for Zarjaz. I can now reveal that the strip is called Red Dragon. Red Dragon is a Welsh superhero from the Zenith universe created by Grant Morrison.

I was particularly excited that this was going to be my first published strip, as I have been a fan of Zenith since it first appeared in 2000AD over 20 years ago.

Issues of Zarjaz containing my strip will be available soon... see here and don't forget I've got something coming up in Dogbreath too, you can pre-order both of these awesome fanzines soon via the same link! Please do help to support these fanzines as they are non-profit ventures and without them it would be far more difficult to begin a career in comics.

Covered!

Wahoo! The reworked cover for Batman 181 I was working on will be featured on Robert Goodin's covered blog... it's scheduled to appear one month from today - pinch punch!


Here's another teaser, but I'll remind you again, don't worry about that!

Spider-man 04 - Final!

Re-worked, re-coloured and re-presented! I give you Recurrent, my Spider-man story!



I'm pretty happy with these now... Nice that I've done all of it myself too, there's a sense of achievement in that!

Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

I've been asking myself questions about these samples; Am I getting closer to the standard necessary for a comic book artist? Are these worth submitting to Panini, the UK publisher for Marvel characters or should I keep hold of them and try to show them at the upcoming Birmingham convention? Can I indeed submit them to Tharg, even though they are not his characters?
My gut feel answers to those questions are; probably, it might prove most useful to get feedback face to face and no, not really.

Next up is a Batman piece I've been casually sketching things for - then it's some strip work for the Zarjaz guys... busy, busy, busy!

Spider-man 02 - Final?

As already indicated, DrawerGeeks topic is Spider-man.



I think it's fair to say that I jumped in the deep end... I had to rush the colours a bit to get it finished... They're ok for my submission deadline, but if I want to show these pages at the Birmingham convention they'll need a bit of work to bring them up to standard at actual size!

Spider-man 02 - Inks

I'm pretty happy with these pages. Gonna colour them now, hopefully have them done fairly swiftly...



There's just one thing that's bugging me, now I see it on screen - MJ on page two, panel three, looks like she doesn't have enough neck - which is really irritating... I hope I can correct this in photoshop by moving her head.

Here are the tightened pencils also...

   

Sun Wukong (Monkey)

Well, more Monkey. I really shouldn't have found this brilliant topic as torturous as it has been.
I think it's a fairly common phenomenon. Given a job/topic that you'd love to do and do well - there is a tendency for the creativity to freeze up on you. A psychological road-block that gets in the way of you and the destination you'd hoped to arrive at. I think you need to keep going though - being a professional dictates that you can't just give up entirely. By taking a couple of detours, you might not end up where you thought you'd like to go, but the journey will have been interesting and you might end up somewhere just as good.



And with that word "journey" in mind. Sun Wukong is the traditional name for the character "Monkey" from 'Journey to the West', an old Chinese legend. Popularized in the 70s by the classic TV show "Monkey Magic" and then again in recent years by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett's stage adaptation.

I'm fairly happy with the treatment and approach to this, albeit a reasonably straight copy of the TV show's. My inked sketch, quickly coloured in photoshop would serve as a character design for a more dynamic martial art style action pose, but time has run out on me, so this will be my submission for DrawerGeeks this time round.

Super-Monkey

DrawerGeeks' new topic is Monkey. I've had real problems with this - I was originally going to do a monkey killing two birds with one stone - but it didn't have the quirky quality I was looking for. Then I thought "Space Monkey" but something I've seen kept creeping into my mind...

I don't really like this Super-Monkey, conceptually I think it's a bit weak - no nice puns to be had with the name Clark Kent or Kal-El... I think at some low point in the Superman franchise there may have been a Super-Monkey. I thought about doing a strip where I just spoof Superman totally but I'm not that excited about it. If it's not working, move on. So here is the best of the aborted approaches.