Two Birthdays

This post marks the third birthday of my blog. Weirdly, this is also post 333, does that make it 50% evil?!

A good pal said to me over the seasonal break that he would like to see my take on The Dude, from the Coen Bros. fabulous The Big Lebowski.
I've got a real soft spot for The Dude, His Dudeness or El Duderino (if you're not into the whole brevity thing).

Like the film itself, there was a nice syncronicity to events, my friend's birthday is tomorrow, my blog would be 3 today, it was a nice quick sketch that I knew he was after and that suited my current status of waiting for feedback on the project I'm working on. Nothing was f**cked, So I drew him a card!


I don't think I've quite captured what I was after, but Jeff Bridges is a tricky chap to depict, even trying to get an essence of The Dude is a tall order... the desire to include (clever) quote related 'in jokes' was definitely not satisfied and originally I intended to do a group shot including Walter and Donny too, but sometimes you eat the bar and sometimes... well, he eats you!

One Cool Cat

Jim Campbell has helped me out more times than I care to mention. He's lettered samples, collaborated on un-paid submissions and has recently worked with me on a tricky job to produce some poster sized comic pages.

Jim has just launched his own blog, Clint Flicker, where the man of letters will deal with his highly under-rated discipline's subtleties.

This weekend is the Birmingham Comcs Convention and hopefully I will have already managed to give Jim the original inks to the illustration of Catwoman below - small thanks for his efforts on my behalf.



This piece also figures as new porfolio piece for the convention and all things being well you can see a coloured version over on Scotch Corner today.

Art Swap: The Spider

My Fractal Friction chums are doing an Art Swap, simply put, each has asked the others for a sketch and in return, you guessed it, they get a sketch... see? Art Swap, simple innit?

First up for me is James Corcoran who asked for The Spider... I'll be honest, I only vaguely knew this character existed and so, I'm not 100% sure I've done him justice.
To me this looks like the Count from Sesame Street and there are a couple of obvious things wrong with it as well, but I set myself the task of doing each sketch within a quarter of an hour, I've done them all now and none took more than about 30-40 minutes. I'm pretty happy with them as sketches and I'll post them up as I receive each of my requests.


In return for The Spider, James has already done me this lovely rendition of Jenny Simmons from Caballistics, Inc. Caballistics, Inc. is a 2000ad strip, a fabulously dark paranormal and supernatural story written by Gordon Rennie and drawn by Dom Reardon... if you haven't read it, I can thoroughly recommend it as a sort of UK version of the Hellboy spin-off BPRD.

Inaba Katana

Judge Inspector Inaba, one of the Judges from another City in Judge Dredd's world, in this case, Hondo-City. This is a 'sketch' that I had promised for John who runs the Cellar of Dredd Blog.


I've been having real problems with my drawing, for the last week and a half, so yesterday I took a break and sketched this up, I've spent a little while fiddling with it in photoshop and I've finally managed to produce something I'm happy with.
I think it could stand being cropped differently, but it was drawn at A4 so I thought I would leave it at those proportions.

Sci-Fi Art Now Update

Well, I had confirmation that one of the pieces I submitted for John Freeman's Sci-Fi Art Now book is to be included! The piece is called The Squadron and I blogged about the process/journey that resulted in the finished piece earlier in the year.

The really cool bit about all this is that some of my art will be in a bona-fide hardback art book that you will be able to order:
amazon.co.uk
amazon.com
More details about the book are available from HarperCollins and John has started a blog about Sci-Fi Art Now to help promote it too... but with all the quality artists involved, it will be worth owning anyway, please help make this book a success by pre-ordering it!


For now, I'm not going to show the piece that will be included, instead I'll show the other piece I submitted. Regular visitors to my blog will recognise this (I assume) from when I reworked it recently as a 2000AD prog one redux.

I had already posted the very rough sketch for the Alien Blob and Space girl as well... there was even a teaser.

I'm very chuffed that my art will make it into Sci-Fi Art Now as it's going to be exactly the sort of book that I used to pour over as a child... this is another big tick in the personal goals chart!

Teen Wulf

Ahh, some news has been reported on thequaequamblog about my involvement on a fun little project that has been brewing since last year's Bristol Comic Expo.
Teen Wulf, a two part story about Wulf Sternhammer's youthful exploits. The first part will be available in the next (imminent) issue of Dogbreath!


I did this sketch as a warm-up whilst Rich Clements, (who should need no introduction to regular readers of my blog) was writing the script.
I've blogged about this in one, two or three teaser postings before...
I'm working on the second part now, and then it's onwards with Corvus, also written by Rich!

Credit to Nic Wilkinson at Insomnia for the great punning on the title.

2 Years Old

Well, happy birthday dear blog. 2 years old today, over 250 posts, 440 ish images, far too many words - too much information?


It's moments in time like this that I take stock and realise I have a lot to be grateful for...

The support of a fine band of people including most notably my wife who is supporting me whilst I chase my dreams.

The opportunities that have been offered to me in just the past couple of months.

I am working at the moment - which is a miracle considering the state the country is in.

Things are looking incredibly good for 2010, but I don't want to jinx myself by wishing/hoping/banking on too much.

and there's loads more besides...

I also have a lot of special thank yous to make, and I know it's a cliché but, those people know who they are... THANK YOU, your help has meant a lot.

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!

Fractal Friction Page 3

Some of you will have already found the fab new web-comic thingy I'm involved with. For those that haven't, Fractal Friction is the endeavour of an eclectic group of fine, talented comic creators, and me. It's my turn and here are the inks for page three...


To see the final lettered and coloured version click over to Fractal Friction to read the story so far...

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.

Zenith and Gronk

Earlier in the year, I illustrated two strips for the fab chaps at FutureQuake Press...
The first was Red Dragon, a Zenith prequel.


The second was Strontium Gronk, A Strontium Dog spin-off.


What do you mean you still haven't bought copies? GO NOW and order them... PLEASE?

Unlettered art for all the pages can be found both on my comicspace page and on my DeviantART.

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.

1 2
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).

3 4
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).

5 6
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.

Where The Wild Things Are

The next topic for DrawerGeeks is Where The Wild Things Are. Maurice Sendak's classic kids' book has already been made into a film by Spike Jonze and will be hitting the cinema soon.

There's a bit in the book where Max tames the Wild Things and I wanted to illustrate that as seen through their eyes.

Me old friend and colleague Matt Dawson did a Wild Things piece a while ago and submitted it to the fantastic tribute blog Terrible Yellow Eyes. Seeing an opportunity, I've submitted this to the curator Cory Godbey in the hope that he'll include it on his blog at some point in the future.

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!

This Is Zarjaz!

The massive news that I've been sitting on for a couple of weeks is that I have designed a new logo for the 2000AD fanzine Zarjaz. Please do check out the home of the Fanzine at The Quaequam Blog.


Yes, it's another one of those ambigram things. I'm really pretty chuffed about this, and for another scoop here how it's going to look on the cover of issue 08!


I also have a strip in this issue as previously blogged about. Copies will be ready for BICS on 3rd October and will be available there, via The Quaequam Blog or the FutureQuake shop. There will also be new issues of Dogbreath (with another strip by me) and Future Quake available too.

Awesome Rogue Trooper artwork courtesy of the ever brilliant PJHolden and Steve Denton (colours).

Gonna have to go before I start giggling like a little girl - I'm so excited!

Scotch Corner - Harley

As previously blogged...


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

Twisted Toucan

Well, I'm jumping the gun with this as we still haven't had Phil's Praying Mantis (no pressure)... But after yesterday's posting I was sketching and drew this evil little creature. The next animal to distort was a Toucan, as selected by Matt and I thought that this fit the bill, or rather, the beak!



Burnt, evil, or another demon like the helliphant - you decide... All I know is that it's my choice of creature for the next round - and damn it, I'm choosing a Donkey... no horses or zebras or other equine relatives, the wonderfully expressive Donkey has only that grumpy purple thing representing it's species in popular culture - time to redress the balance!

Cover Recreation

On the 2000ADonline forum over the last couple of weeks there have been a couple of inspiring cover recreations from old 2000ADs.
Firstly there was Matt Soffe's tribute to Mick McMahon's 1985 annual cover
and secondly there was Steve Millar's Patrick Goddard commission to recreate prog 199's cover.


I decided to have a crack at my own recreation. For a number of reasons I chose prog 310, great Mick McMahon cover for the Carlos Ezquerra illustrated story Starborn Thing.


I went with the current logo as I didn't want to too closely recreate the same cover. I tried to inject some of the original artists' styles into my piece, but unfortunately, I don't think it's all quite worked how I wanted it to.



Here for reference are the initial stages before all the glossy rendering and graphics got slapped on. If anyone wants it, I'll happily swap or sell the original inks to this piece.