Season's Greetings

It's that time of year again.


I've just sent out my e-card to (hopefully) all of my friends, family, clients and collaborators etc.

En-masse e-mail delivery paranoia demands that I state here that if you haven't received the card, feel you should have or would like to receive it next year... please do that which is necessary to alert me, fix your filters and/or notify your e-mail provider that I'm not spam!

It's a truly awful pun, but that is, in-keeping with festive or seasonal jokes found in crackers...

The initial idea was just a horrible cardigan made into a card, like so many 'Christmas jumpers' of my youth - after sketching a perplexed and generic 'every-man' holding up said offending garment, it occurred that the real joke was in the misunderstanding. Why it became Peter Parker and MJ is anybody's guess, but my guess would fall firmly in the camp of "because I like drawing girls".

The usual 'stages' stuff follows:

digital roughs

sketch-up lounge guide

final digital "pencils"

inks

All the very best of the season to you all, have a good one!

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.

Surrender Dorothy!

Now in Technicolor!

I'm just about done on the Wizard of Oz, Judge Dredd and Johnny Alpha cross-over commission.


There's still a decision to be made over the final dialogue though...

Action Packed

Here's something a bit different from my usual stuff. My good friend Russ asked if I would do a spoof of the fabulous Traction Man is Here by Mini Grey, using him as the subject for his girlfriend Clare's birthday.


Emulating Mini Grey (to a certain extent) and trying to get enough of a likeness was a really enjoyable challenge.

If you haven't read Traction Man, please do follow the link above and invest in a copy - you won't regret having dazzle painted battle pants in your life!

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!

2000AD Twitter

Over on the 2000ad forums, the monthly art comp is something I usually intend to contribute to... but I seldom find the time these days. This month, it's such a good theme - mash-ups/crossovers and I had what I thought was a pretty good idea. A twitter spoof!


So I enlisted the services of my good pal and frequent collaborator Rich Clements and made time!

For the uninitiated, twitter reads from the bottom up... so you'll need to click the image, zoom in and scroll to the bottom to start!

I really hope you enjoy reading this as much as Rich and I did producing it!

Moore's Mini Me

It's such a stupid little joke...


My sincere apologies to Alan Moore...

2000AD Prog 1 Redux

Warren Ellis is running a fun competition over on his web forum.


The brief:
You are an artist/designer. You have to put together the cover for the first issue of a weekly science-fiction anthology comic called 2000AD. You don't know much about what's in it. You've been given the following pieces of information to include on the cover somehow:
"featuring the new DAN DARE"
"M.A.C.H. 1 - his incredible hyperpower will amaze you!"
"SPACE-AGE DINOSAURS! Read 'FLESH' "
"STOP PRESS! GREAT BRITAIN INVADED!"
The cover must include a logo and the numbering, which you've been told is not the usual "issue one," but "Programme 1."

I thought it would be funny if Dan Dare had been a girl for the relaunch... The image is from something I did previously, but didn't want to show here at the time.

Evil Genius

The new DrawerGeeks topic is 'Evil Genius'. This was loads and loads of fun with stacks of possibilities. I thought about the classic Donald Pleasance Bond villian and Mike Myers' Dr.Evil that was spawned by him. I thought about Ming the merciless and other such Sci-Fi villains... I thought about Dick Dastardly, The Hooded Claw, Baron Greenback and Dr. Frankenstein... I was tempted to revisit some old ground too.



What have I come up with then? Only a rough sketch, but one that I'm pleased seems to capture the essence of a lot of those characters mentioned above, but it also owes something to Braniac from Superman and Dr. Emit Brown from Back to the Future for the hat thing.

I'd have loved to have a bit more time to work this up, design a proper lair and possibly a henchman or two in the background too, alas time she was a cruel mistress and for now this is where I must leave it.

Oh, and one last thing:
Mwhah-ha-ha-ha-ha-haaaaaaa!

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!

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.

Frankenstein's Monster

The current topic for DrawerGeeks is Frankenstein's Monster.


Having done a version of the monster once or twice before, I was reluctant to tread the same ground.
Unfortunately as my idea arrived a bit late in the day yesterday, I've only partially finished it. I think it illustrates the concept though and I'm fairly happy with it - hopefully I'll get the chance to finish it up properly, but it's joining a long 'to do' list!

2000AD cover competition

Over on the 2000AD forums, they have a monthly art competition. This month is cover-recreations or "cover versions"... Basically anything you want to do: a straight recreation or a mix up with 2000AD characters and albums, dvds or book covers - even other comics...
I've chosen to do a cover that never was - but potentially should have been... Fink Angel, one of my all time favourite Dredd-world villains first appeared in prog 193. The initial story ran for 4 progs, but Fink would return again...


In the story, a cover to a newspaper falls into Fink's hands alerting him that his estranged family have all been sentenced to death by Judge Dredd - well naturally, being the Cursed Earth homicical maniac that he is, he sets out to avenge his kin!

There has been some corking entries already and I've thrown last month's recreation of prog 310 into the mix already. Something rattled around my goldfish memory and reminded me that I'd done another (sample) cover for 2000AD...

Last July - very nearly a year to the day in fact... I presented this to the blogging fraternity.
That was when the light went on in my brain and I knew what I wanted to be for the first time in over a decade. Looking at this - I can see how much more accomplished the Fink cover is in comparison - nothing really wrong with this Dawn of the Dead spoof...
but I feel like I've come such a long way in what has surprisingly been only a year!

Oddly enough there are some pretty strong compositional similarities in these two pieces... a slight twist where the villain is the wide-stanced focus (although he shares some of those quirky zombie characteristics) and the "hero" is in the background - other wise there's not much to tell, which I think means that the basics of my approach aren't that different and I am just honing my skills.

Taormina Pulp Fiction

I decided to have some fun with a spoof, pulp-fiction paperback cover to an imaginary spin-off book.



There's a bigger version of this over on the Taormina blog where you can see the cover in better detail.

I did some searching around for covers from mass market paperbacks to help with this, I hope I've struck the right balance.

Illustration Friday - "Sail"

How the hell does this qualify as "sail"??? that's what you're asking...





These were some storyboards I did recently as a tryout for a media company... I reworked thumbnails from a storyboard for an advert that didn't get made. I had to keep quiet about these for a month or so but I think it's ok to show them now.

The idea was that this was the battle of Waterloo (or a pastiche of that battle) and the two generals/leaders rode out and had a bit of a verbal slanging match - much to their men's entertainment. Obviously the side that won was fuelled by some form of dutch courage (the beer that was trying to be marketed) or maybe that was simply the incentive or the spoils of victory...

Put simply, the generals assailed each other... or perhaps the Duke of Wellington ("There's only one way to win a war, Shout, Shout and SHOUT AGAIN! MEEAHH!" [Blackadder the Third]) assailed himself on Napoleon... Yeah, tenuous, I know.

The b&w panels took about 8hrs in total, hence why some of them a pretty rough, the final (larger) panel is a tidied up version of the soldiers done to show a more 'glossy' option for the ad company to sell their concept to the client and probably took another three of four to complete.

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!

Comic Relief...

The brilliant comic artist Chris Weston has just put a post about little old me on his blog (Hello if you have travelled to me from there). I feel truly humbled by his kind words! If you haven't come from there, you need to check out his stuff. He's recently completed a very nice Judge Death Pin-up and that together with his posting about me has a nice kind of synergy to it as I have been thinking about trying to get some comics work.

I used to be an avid fan of 2000ad and Judge Dredd. I collected it almost religiously from prog 425 and even bought vast numbers of back issues.

I kind of lost track around 2001 but I've seen some amazing work being produced for it currently. So much so that I'm inspired to try to get involved. In order to get some work doing comics, I first need to show that I can do sequential art, I was looking for a script to simply draw up, but couldn't find anything on the web. I have finally surrendered to the inevitable and started to write a script of my own...



... but in the meantime, I've been sketching old Judge Joe Dredd. I haven't drawn the jaw in such a long time and I wasn't sure how I wanted my interpretation of Mega-City One's top lawman to look. Do I want a more cartoony Mike McMahon look? I know I couldn't do a Brian Bolland and I'm not as out-there as Simon Bisley. Glenn Fabry, Steve Dillon and Ian Gibson were all heros of mine also... but in the end I think I need to go my own way, taking all the things I like (and think I'm capable of) into account!

The sketch above took about 45mins and then about another 10 or 15 for the typography (all digital). Yes clearly it's a pastiche of the much imitated Lord Kitchener poster and probably needs quite a lot of work to make it work as a stand alone image.

Han & Chewie

I took the Han Solo I did previously, gave him a body and added his old pal Chewbacca... This is another reasonably rough digital sketch for fun.

The poses were taken from some old Episode IV publicity shots I found floating around on the web. I love Chewie's vaguely knock-kneed apathy compared to Harrison's cock-sure hero stance.

I'd really like to see the adventures of Han and Chewie (before they got involved with that Skywalker boy) as opposed to the stuff that Lucasfilm seems to be producing currently. I don't know whether I'll go and see The Clone Wars and I'm not holding my breath for the Star Wars TV series coming sometime around 2011!

The Adventures of Han Solo and Chewbacca...

Come on George, dig around in your beard for some old space-pirate tales, you know it makes sense!

"I'll never join you!"

"But I was going into Toshi Station to pick up some power converters!"

There's huge differences in Mark Hamill's face between episodes IV and V that's makes it tough to do a good early Luke. A car accident I think was the cause of the change, I've tried to get a bit of the earlier luke in with his more familiar physiognomy.

This is a quick digital again, but I think this one is less successful than my previous Star Wars caricatures, not sure who I'll pick next...

"Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi!"

She had some of the best lines and the weirdest hairdos... I'm not mentioning the outfits, especially the slave girl outfit, not mentioning that at all but I know all you other boys are thinking about it again.

Not sure how successful this is, take away the danish pastries and I'm not sure you'd know it's her...