Dogtaroo

As previously mentioned, tomorrow, I'll be at The CamCon.

First person to drop by and say "DOGTAROO!" to me will earn themselves this picture of the current Doctor Who for free.

Admittedly, it's not the best portrait of him, and the anatomy is a little off in the arms, but it was one of those 15 minute sketch things with limited reference, so I'm not too unhappy with it.

Cam Com Con

This coming weekend, Saturday 12th May to be specific. I'll be sketching at the inaugural Cam Con. Cambridge's first anime, comics and gaming convention. It's being held at the popular Cambridge venue, The Junction 2 on Clifton Way.

I'll be sharing a table with the lovely Leigh Gallagher... and these here pictures are a taster for the kind of things I'll be drawing...

... I see that these here Avengers types are quite popular at the moment, and that movie is playing just across the way from the Junction at the local Cineworld Cinema. You call it shameless shirt-tail riding, I call it entrepreneurial...

...not in the same league as Tony Stark I grant you, but nevertheless I'll be drawing for me supper and hoping to take a few commissions too.

Psychic Sidekick

I've recently done this sketch of Judge Anderson...




I was asked to do a companion piece for this Dredd sketch that I was selling (now gone obviously).

If anyone wants something similar, A3 in pencil, I'm doing them at the moment for £25 inc. P&P. I'll be ending that offer from 30th April onwards as Royal Mail is putting up the postage costs... so that's a tight window for anyone wanting something.

Sale update

A few pieces have gone. So here is an updated for sale "gallery" with the last of the pieces I'd earmarked for selling added in.


Act quickly and take advantage of the cheaper postage costs before Royal Mail hike the prices at the end of the month!

Also for sale.

Another Dredd A3 pencils. Can you afford to take him on?


She's a fox. A4 ink and magic marker, make me an offer...

Inks Sale

I'm selling some original inks...


If you're interested, please click the image above for prices and what's on offer... I can provide higher res images also. To contact me via e-mail please use this address:



All prices inc. P&P. Art will be sent out first class in a board backed envelope.

Happy Birthday Sidrah

Here's a commission I recently completed. The brief was simple, a 21st Birthday; Sidrah (the birthday girl) hugging Sulley.


Interestingly (or not) in my old life as a toy designer, I drew Sulley from Monsters Inc. a hell of a lot - I even sculpted him to be made into a pen. So I was very familiar with the character already.

Here's my sculpt, for that pen. This is one of a small number of casts that I still own out of numerous characters I sculpted during my 12 odd years.

Again, interestingly, or not, as the case may be, sculpting the character to look right with all that fur and so that it would come out of an injection mold tool was, in places, a bit tricky...

Here's the pen, as was available with Smarties as I recall.

As was often the case, the sculpting I had done, for some reason got over worked in the production piece, leaving the finished article looking less like the character than the sculpt that I had struggled to get approved by Disney/Pixar's licensing department.

Looking back at this, I'm surprised by how naff it really is. That was the nature of the beast though, cheap give-aways, by their very definition are a bit naff.

Let's not delve too deeply into my murky past as a toy designer now though. Let us instead focus on, as has becoming increasingly the case with my posts, the process stuff (for this commission).

The sketch work, which I will admit got jiggered about with in photoshop once I scanned it. In fact I totally reworked the likeness. Also adding a sketch-up model of a suitable door that I bunged together very quickly... I still like the flexibility that a sketch-up model gives, should I need to reposition the camera for a different view, I don't have to work out the perspective again... some might think it overkill or even cheating, but, I'll never have to draw a door again and worry that the perspective is wrong.

As an aside, I find that when I do build the environment (such as it is in this case) I'm far more confident when it comes time to putting the characters 'in situ' because I can move things around. If it doesn't look right, I can just move the camera angle or pan or whatever in sketch-up and export the image again.

On this commission, the trickiest part was Sidrah's likeness. So I wanted to ink it first to check that everyone was happy. I wouldn't usually do it in this way, but inking the tough bit first meant that I wasn't risking so much if I got it wrong... I was fairly confident that the Sulley would look good because I've drawn him so much before. All the same, I'm pretty pleased with my inking on this piece as it happens...

...and here are the final inks as they looked when scanned and then with all the blue-line removed ready for colouring. Sometimes I think that the blue pencils add a bit of depth to the inks and when I take that away the inks just look too clean to me until I get some colour and texture worked into the image.

Overall, I think it's a pretty successful piece. Having spent time on modelling the door, ultimately I was unsure how I felt about it - compositionally I thought it complicated things, but I liked the implied narrative... I ended up with a number of alternate versions, my favourite (in the end, despite the sketch-up time) was without the door. The green door was Sidrah's preferred option though and was the one I printed and sent out with the inks and sketch work.








All that remains is to say happy birthday to Sidrah for today and thank her big sister Sadiah for a fun commission.

In The Beginning

The Themed Art Blog are having a Harry Potter week. I'd been needing something to get me loosened up and relaxed. So here, are Hagrid and Harry, from the beginning of The Philosopher's Stone.

I didn't refer to the book, but I know Hagrid delivers Harry to the Dursley's house on his motorbike, and I've a sneaky suspicion that Harry is in a basket or something...

...but I've been (unsurprisingly) paternal recently, and couldn't help going all whimsical with a caring cradling pose.

Sneaky Peek

A bit slow on the up-take news-wise, but it looks like a cracking little Dredd strip I finally finished late last year will be out over the summer in Zarjaz issue 15.


Judge Dredd, The Taking of Mopad 456 by Lee Robson and myself.

Some stages for this teaser panel:


part of the bonkers amount of work I did in google sketch-up... in my opinion you can't really tell how much I did used models, for good or bad!




sketched over to add good old Joe Dredd in there. He's celebrating 35 years in comics this week! 2000ad was 35 last week...





here's the inks, see, most of that modelling was a waste of time, or certainly seems to fade into the background.





finally, the toned version ready to have some textures added.

Special Project

Just before New Year, my lovely wife gave birth to this little bundle of joy.

Ted Sampson Levell
Needless to say, things may be a little quiet on the blogging front for a while...
Please do check in every once in a while though, as I do have some other exciting projects I will be working on this year and normal service will be resumed as soon as possible!

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!

Dante Claus

Yesterday was my turn to submit to the 2000ad virtual advent calendar.

A terrible, terrible pun drifted into my mind - but one that had to be done! Nikolai Dante is the swashbuckling lead character in the 2000ad saga of the same name, created by Robbie Morrison and Simon Fraser. For the uninitiated, Jena Makarov is his love interest (a frequently thwarted one).


here are the pencils and inks for those of you who are interested in the process.




I had a number of captions and dialogue options, some more smutty than others, and I even asked for some opinions, and they were as divided as my own... in the end I left the 'sack' jokes alone, despite the puerile joy of them. You are welcome to suggest any and all alternate options in the comments though!

2000ad Advent 2011

For the past couple of years, Pete Wells, charming host of the 2000ad covers uncovered blog has run an online advent calendar on the 2000ad forum.

This year is no different, and once again, my effort is early doors number 2. For those who're interested, and haven't seen them before, here are my efforts for 2009 and 2010.

Not wanting to spoil any potential surprises, here's a crop of my rough.

The final version should be up on the forum already, but if not it will be soon!

You can keep up with the wonderful entries each day until the 24th by calling in to the forum topic here.

All round Comics' Geezer.

Jim Campbell should need no introduction, as a letterer at least, but what a lot of people don't know is that he is also a talented artist too.


Jim did the above illustration in response to my Judge Kev photo (see previous post of me in a Planet Replica's Judge's helmet) that was taken by Bolt-01 at Thoughtbubble.