Lesson is More, Moron Less.

I've had this idea bumping around in my head for close to ten years now. Usually it would get paraded out when I heard about someone doing something stupid... the 'less/fewer' error was pointed out to me by my wife, Vicky, some time ago. Learning from the mistake (in the spirit of the comment itself) meant that I had to stop saying it, even though I still thought it was funny.


The blackboard and 'teacher's correction' idea hit me this morning and so I quickly put this together in photoshop. The idea, like me, is bettered by Vicky's input I think.

I doubt very much that the phrase was ever original to me but It's nice when an old idea finally comes to fruition and you don't see someone else who's made something of 'your' idea before you do.

Termight Motivation

So a post on ECBT2000ad made me revisit something I did a couple of weeks ago.



Pretty simple as I had the graphics already sitting around on my computer. 30 minute spoof- lovely.

Logo Designs

Last year, as a result of a recommendation by my buddy Dave Stokes, I was asked to produce a logo for a gaming book by a company that produces wargame figurines. Miniature Design Studio produces 28mm figurines for what I'd describe as role playing games...

The brief was to create a logo with a 'calligraphy bias'. The name of the game was 'origin'. This was the design that was settled on:


Recently, I was approached to do a further two logos. This time, in b&w and colour.


Again, there was a strong 'calligraphic' bais to the letter forms.

It's always nice to mix up things a bit and I do enjoy working on something so different from my more usual illustration work. Different challenges keep things fresh I think because coming back to drawing after these has been a real joy as well.

Keep Calm and Carry On?

You know this is what you'll really do:


I did this, this afternoon before the news broke about The News of the World ceasing publication... seems sort of more appropriate now.

*EDIT* Seen a lot of this on the interwebs after a double check search... in fact, just about everything but my permutation of words. oh well, no such thing as a new idea.

Refined Tattoo Design

I am touched and humbled by the comments about my design, here, on facebook, twitter and on the 2000ad Forum.



I have tidied up the design a little to make it neater and hopefully just a little more effective before Mike finally takes the plunge.

The Dredagle Tattoo

What do you see first?


Judge Dredd or an Eagle?

Last year, Mike from the 2000ad forum asked for someone to design him a Judge Dredd Eagle tattoo... I had a go at designing something for him and this was one he chose from several options I showed him:


He tweaked it a little from the originals:


All was well until recently. Before taking the plunge and permanently marking himself, he asked for some last minute opinions... a wise decision as it turns out!
As soon as the word Nazi was mention, I did a quick google image search for "Nazi Eagle" and was thoroughly shocked to discover that I had inadvertently designed something that was pretty close to one of their emblems... I immediately offered to design something else for Mike.


I began by sketching ideas out and very quickly hit on the Eagle-head & wings forming the visor section of Dredd's helmet (bottom right above). It was serendipity I reckon, to have created Dredd's visage and an Eagle in one emblem, I was pretty chuffed.
Before showing anything to Mike, I worked in photoshop and created the top left one below.

Mike asked for some alternatives, possibly with Dredd's badge or with the Eagle's legs (top middle and top right) but I didn't like that it made Dredd look like Chad and a bit beard-y respectively).



After this, Mike decided that he like to see some alternatives based upon my original again, but trying to work more of the Eagle's chest into the design. I showed Mike a few more variations than I've shown in the middle row above. There was a bit more discussion before I presented the final two in the bottom row. He selected the one at the top of the posting and we're gathering opinions now before Mike does actually go ahead and get himself branded!

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!

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!

Salamander

Another one of those creatures I've been doing semi-occasionally with Matt and Phil...
My Salamander is not really twisted at all... I wanted to treat this one very graphically to see what would happen... possibly with a view to developing some T-Shirt designs.


Phil's already done his push-me-pull-you styled take on it, but Matt is very busy on some other projects right now - no pressure buddy, it'll keep!

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!

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!

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.

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!

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.

Drawer Geeks - Giant Monsters

I've been lucky enough to be inducted into the DrawerGeeks illustration fraternity. My good blogging pal Doug Bell has introduced me and I am chuffed to be involved. The rough idea is a fortnightly topic based on fictional characters. The current topic is GIANT MONSTERS and this morning I decided it might be a good way to get myself back into the swing of things.

I wanted to do a rework for Attack of the 50ft Woman but somehow it didn't quite work out like that. I started sketching but couldn't help thinking about the bit in Watchmen when Dr. Manhattan is 50 ft tall blasting things to bits with his fingers in Vietnam. (issue 4 pg 20 for ref)


This was my natural progression of those two thoughts...

WATCHMEN II: THE BRIDE OF MANHATTAN

I love the whole 'B' movie spoof stuff and the word Bride seemed to carry the right sort of connotations with it for this.

Watchmen is a one-off complete story and it struck me that the (giant monster) money-making-machine that is Hollywood could plough headlong into franchise mentality if the upcoming film is a success. I think this might be Alan Moore's worst fear and part of the reason I added the 'Wizard of Northampton' desperately running away from the horror of it all.

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!

The Future of Comics

Over on the app store you can now download PJ Holden and Al Ewing's pretty phenomenal iPhone comic application - Eye Candy - just follow this link to download it!


This is the first of many comics that Infurious Comics are intending to release...
...and from what I understand (from a conversation I've just had with PJ) there could be some pretty good reasons to get excited!

As a taster of what you'll get for your hard earned pennies (99cents or approx 59p), here's the YouTube teaser again:


If you own an iPhone or iPod touch, please help to support this venture - download the comic, post about this development on your blog, shout from the rooftops if you have to...

Here's the link in full if you need it: http://tinyurl.com/4qjr4p