Sinister Dexter Pg.1 panel 4

After fiddling with the 'paint' job on this for a bit too long - I have decided that I don't really like the effect that I am getting here. What worked quickly and effectively for the Pulpy Punisher seems mired in labourious detail when applied to strip work.

As I had altered some stuff from the pencils, I used the existing file to create a 'non-reproducing blue' guide for inking... That took some doing, but I'm part way done on inking the page now and despite the desire to show the other style at BICS, I'm much happier with the results I've already produced with my inks. Hopefully it will just be a case of 'dropping' them over the already worked-up colour file.

It doesn't hurt to experiment, and I'm glad I gave this a crack but in order to be ready for next weekend, it will be safer to produce the rest of these samples in my tried and tested style - I just hope I'm not doing myself a disservice with this decision.

Oh and just one final thing. The comics with my first published work are now available via the good folk at FutureQuake Press - and you can order them here.
OR HERE:

Zarjaz issue 08 - £3 + p&p

Dogbreath issue 21 - £3 + p&p

Please do help to support the endeavour, as without Small Press publishers like FutureQuake, it would be much harder for people like me to get work in print. They have other new comics out as well, all produced for the love of the medium.

Sinister Dexter Pg.1 rough

Here is a sneak peak at that page again... very rough (and incomplete) colours this time, not wholly sure that the 'painted' approach is working for me. The script asks for early evening and I've wondered about rendering the whole page as an orangey or sepia tonal thing.

Rendering without the benefit of a nice ink line to follow makes the task of colouring up a lot more intense... Inked lines hide a multitude of sins and the thicker they are the better they are at hiding where I've gone over the lines!

Sinister Dexter Pg.1 pencils

I've had the script for this for a while.
Sinister Dexter - Tart Au Citroen
Originally published in 2000AD prog 1282. I was intending to do this in the style I've been using for all my comic samples...

...but comments made on the Pulpy Punisher have led me to the decision to 'paint' this in photoshop. Thanks for the input everyone, I really appreciate the support.
I don't know how much of the script I'll get done in this style before BICS but I should be clear of other work to finish enough of it to be worth showing.

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.

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!

Dynamic Dredd?

After Tharg's last comments and in line with some sage advice from Dylan Teague, I revisited the 'two guns' approach for Dredd - with a healthy dose of "have you ever fired two guns whilst jumping through the air?" I think there is a distinct improvement in Dredd's 'power' and the further push on the foreshortened right hand adds more "IN YOUR FACE!" Looking at it again, I now notice the Eagle needs to be further out, to broaden Dredd's shoulders. I'll rework this a bit more, I think.



I've been working on a new website all week, as I feel that the current one isn't really reflective of what I'm doing/want to do more of.
Whilst scanning stuff for the (long overdue) sketchbook pages, I found this sketch of Dredd from a couple of weeks ago - I think it's way too static, but something made me scan it in... something about it really screamed "that's Dredd!" at me... I don't think it's representative of how I think I want my comic pages to look, I think it's more that there's something familiar about this Dredd, he looks 'bigger' somehow...
I've nearly finished building the new site, it's more of a 'refresh' than a rebrand, but hopefully it'll be ready soon and I can upload it.

Judge Dredd Figure Inked

Inks for the Dredd I've been working on.
Experimenting with this currently - I may end up inking the background... depends on how some colour roughs go.

DrawerGeeks - Dragon

The new topic on DrawerGeeks is Dragon.

I'm supposed to be packing the house up for our upcoming move...


...but I found 25 minutes to take part. I'd normally have loved to get all involved doing a lovely fantasy dragon. I nearly drew Bruce Lee, but in the end humour won out, and you have the submission above.

Judge Dredd - Costume Concept

Since the end of last year there has been a lot of discussion on the 2000AD forums about the new Judge Dredd film that's in the works. Danny Boyle's DNA films are producing it, but he's got nothing to do with the actual filming.

I thought the 1995 film was poor and I am hoping for so much more this time around.

I've curbed my enthusiasm until now and have just done a quick little doodle of the sort of direction I hope they take Dredd's uniform in the film.


Nothing too drastic or original, a twist on the established look.

Just a bit more 'riot' style padding in the body suit - a gunslinger holster ala Han Solo, then, all black; kevlar, leather, carbonfibre & thick rubber on the pads & accessories etc.

With the uber-cool looking Watchmen on it's way, and the bar being set I think by Batman begins, the Dark Knight and the first outings of X-men and Spider-man - Dredd has some big boots to fill!

A Confederacy of Dunces

No, not a posting about the world governments... This posting is regarding the fabulous book by John Kennedy Toole -
A Confederacy Of Dunces and I can't recommend it highly enough.

The fat, obnoxious, self aggrandizing protagonist pictured here is called Ignatius J. Reilly, he has an overactive pyloric valve, a penchant for hot dogs and he's mean to his momma!

I've had this lurking around since last October... at the time I never quite felt I captured all that was necessary to do the character justice.

My good pal Matt didn't want to see my versions for fear of having his own attempt coloured by mine... His take on the character can been seen here and very good it is too. This means I am now free to share my version with you all!

I did loads of doodling and here are just a few pages from the sketchbook (badly photographed with lots of fish-eye distortion).

I never felt I'd got him right and there are things that are described in the book that I couldn't seem to express when I put pen to paper. Some things are just like that - better in the imagination!

I tried lots of different looks for Ignatius and I even looked at trying to push his features as far as I could in the direction of a pig.

That didn't work as the depth of the character demanded something more. I thought about Peter Ustinov, Martin Clunes and Orson Welles... and a few other people that I can't remember the names of right now.

Not that you'd have known...

In the end I picked the version I felt most closely represented the character I saw in my mind.

I pasted it onto a body that hadn't taken much effort at all and did a quick colour treatment on it, using mainly flat patterns plaid, tweed and corduroy (dropped in for speed).

It's interesting, but Matt has chosen to represent the plaid shirt that is so characteristic of Ignatius in a 'flat' collage type way too...

If his reason for doing it was anything like mine, then it was a mixture of laziness and wanting to avoid all the effort of painting that damned checkered pattern.

In retrospect I'm not unhappy with the characterization here. Buy the book, read it, and please let me know what you think of Ignatius and my illustration of him.

Mute Swan

This is a quick little logo I've designed for a project I'm working on at the moment.


It didn't need to be a particularly brilliant logo. It just needed to have something to do with a lack of noise. I chose the swan as that felt like a crest kind of an animal and there weren't many options for creatures that were habitually silent.

Also, gotta say, I'm pretty chuffed - I got noticed by those chaps behind the 2000AD fan site 2000AD review for my recent Judge Dredd sample pages - Thanks guys!

Judge Dredd Pencil Test

Still trying to decide how I'm going to produce the finished art for the sample Dredd script.


I've blown up the rough pencils to 133% of 2000AD's actual page size in Photoshop and I've knocked it all back to blue-lines. Then I've printed them out on my nice shiny new Pixma iX4000 A3 printer.

I worked over the top of the roughs in pencil and scanned it back in. Just by mucking about with 'channel mixer' and 'levels' in Photoshop I've brought the pencil lines to as close to black as I can. I think it's ok, but for final art I'll need to be more careful with the line placement than I've been on this test.

I'm still debating in my mind actually inking these pages, as I really do want to produce something I can point at and call final art... I think I'm just lacking a little gung-ho attitude or perhaps even just a tiny bit of old-fashioned confidence. I'm hoping that will come with experience.

Illustration Friday - "Poof"

On Saturday they were going to turn on The Large Hadron Collider. This is a massive particle accelerator which will be used to observe and study the smallest particles known to man...

There is some talk that they are going to use it to try to recreate the circumstances of the big bang!

There are mixed views of what actually turning it on will mean. With the scientists looking forward to seeing some results from the $ 8billion investment and other parties proclaiming that the world will be sucked into an artificially produced black hole...



I don't know much about the physics of this, but it sounds like a crazy sci-fi movie where these well-meaning boffins came up with an idea and just did it. You know, after realizing that they could do it, they didn't actually stop to consider if they actually should... and now we're all gonna die horribly or in this case vanish in a puff/poof of logic.

For more info on the LHC simply search 'Large Hadron Collider' into any good search engine... in some news reports it looks like they've postponed the apocalypse until 21st October now!

Dredd (tablet inked)

Brian Bolland now uses his computer for inking and colouring...
I've got a sneaking suspicion that the very popular Boo Cook also works digitally.

I thought I'd give digital inking a shot as an experiment.



I'm not sure I'm happy with the results - the gains made are easily outweighed by the fact that the inking is a little soulless. Put simply, I don't like it - I'm off now to do things as they were intended - man, paper and pen!

< for Illustration Friday, I've canned this approach! >