Joker - Teeth

The next topic for DrawerGeeks is teeth and I did my piece early this time. As this was intended as a companion piece to Harley Quinn anyway, I decided to submit it to Scotch Corner as well - those lovely guys were kind enough to feature it over the weekend!


I, as I'm sure many others have been, was incredibly impressed with how the Joker was portrayed in The Dark Knight. A lot of that was down to Heath Ledger, but I thought the Chelsea Grin was a great idea and I don't know how original it was but I thought about trying to take that one step further, whilst I was sketching I reasoned: "What if the Joker had cut off his lips in order to create a permanent smile?". It's a horrible thought and it surprised me - sometimes you have to go with those thoughts and not self edit...

Joker's Progress

I am lucky enough to once again have a piece of my work thrust into the spotlight over on the fantastic Scotch Corner. Appearing tomorrow will be my version of the Joker. Here is the work in progress for it.

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Initially I drew the head and face for the Joker in my sketch book.
I scanned this at 300dpi, mucked about in photoshop and added the hand with the playing card (1).
Then I started to add some colour to the piece, trying out different things but ultimately knowing that I wanted a classic colour scheme for the final piece (2).

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I changed my mind about how the piece should be cropped and added the top of the Joker's head... at this point I also added the little Joker as previously posted and the ambigram of the word Joker from the Harley Quinn piece I did in July (3).
The next step was to drop out all the colour and create an image that would only print from the cyan tank of my printer (4).

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I inked the "blue-scale" image after printing it out onto a nice sheet of bristol board (5).
Obviously I don't want all that blue, I just want the nice clean ink lines (6).
In photoshop there are plenty of ways to remove the blue - I use the channel mixer to remove most of the blue but some people prefer to convert to CMYK and then throw away the cyan channel. Both methods require some fiddling with levels to remove any grey areas and leave a nice Black and white image.

The final stage for me was to composite my two files (3) and (6), clean up any glaringly obvious problems, add some sort of background and a bit of texture to add some more depth to it all. To see how the final thing turned out, pop over to Scotch Corner on Saturday!

As an aside, I think this is pretty appropriate as a Halloween post!

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.

Final Harley

Well, I'm gonna post this here in full now.



I was very pleased with how she turned out in the end. Thanks for all the kind comments.

Scotch Corner - Harley

As previously blogged...


She's up on Scotch Corner... Go, have a look!

Carpet Pattern Card

I've finished my submission for Scotch Corner and I've had word from Graeme that he'll post it up in tomorrow's guest spot. Here is a bit of a teaser...


...and this is a pattern I created for an aborted project that involved a flying carpet. In the Harley Quinn pin-up, I've used the pattern as the pattern on the back of the card, and I have to say, I think it's far more effective as that than it ever felt as a magic carpet design.


I always think of Weaveworld when I think of magic carpets, and I am sure I recall thinking about that book when I was designing this pattern circa 1999 - now that's recycling for you!

Joker - ambigram

Been mucking about with the Harley Quinn card background and obviously, she'll be on a 'joker' background. The thing with playing cards is the topsy-turvy thing. I've played about with ambigrams before but it struck me that there was a pretty good reason to have one here.


Now look at it upside-down, careful you don't crick your neck though!

Harley Quinn

I'm honoured to have been invited by Graeme Neil Reid to contribute to Scotch Corner. Scotch Corner is a collection of (top) Scottish professional artists, and although the only thing even remotely scotch about me is a penchant for 12 year malts, I am chuffed that I'll be in such illustrious company. Just as soon as I work up the sketch below to a finished standard, I'll send it to Graeme, with thanks for his continued support!



Batman villainess, Harley Quinn - does she need any explanation or reasoning? I'm gonna do a clichéd 'joker card' background that she's just shot/blasted her way through, hence the 'bow/curtsy' and hopefully it'll work. I've slapped some rough colour down and she's looking sexy enough... I have some other stuff to muddle through today and thoughts before I get back to it later (most likely tomorrow) would be most appreciated.

In other news, my refreshed website is up and ready for critiques. There are some errors I've already found and there are some things that can't be revealed just yet... but please pop along and let me know what you think. Thanks to Phil for plugging it already on his blog too!