Work in progress again, back on the Tyranny Rex commission. Rob wanted me to vary a few things from the interim layout but I wasn't quite happy with Tyranny anyway, so I tried a couple of extra poses out...
I got a bit carried away and then couldn't decide which one worked best... if in doubt, let the client decide!
Rob chose 'E'... and suggested I wrap her tail around a dancer's pole! Things are coming together nicely now, and I'll post up the rough pencils here in the next couple of days.
Amongst other bits and pieces and preparation for this weekend's Kapow, I've been doing a commission for John Burdis, I'd done something for The Cellar of Dredd before, a quick single illustration of Hondo-Cit's Inspector Inaba. I'd done that under my own steam following the fab time I had at the Hi-Ex Comicon, but this time, John had something in mind.
The following is all about the "process" for those of you who like to see the work in progress stuff.
I did an initial sketch based upon John's original brief:
"Dredd stood in the middle of a street with dead superheroes strewn all around him and Joe saying something along the lines of "Costumed vigilantes, leave the real crime fighting to me!" The characters who would be dead would include Superman (head missing definitely), Batman, Wonderwoman, Captain America and all those other US bods."
One thought kept floating around my brain, a pile of dead super-heroes and something in Brian Bolland's classic cover to Prog 2000 kept nagging at me as well.
John liked the inital sketch but had a couple of requests for additions if I could manage them:
First up was a simple addition to the roster of the dispatched: "Green Arrow's arm with a broken bow"
Next was just a weapons' upgrade to the "Colt Widowmaker " instead of the Anti-Hero gun I'd been musing over as the reason why Dredd was now able to dispatch these super-heroes.
Finally, a nice way to really make the commission a personal one: " a large pristine BURDIS BLOCK and a couple of derelict smaller blocks with the names MARVEL and DC".
In Dredd's world, towering apartment Blocks are often named after famous people, sometimes for satirical reasons, sometimes equally as a tribute to that person. I felt that DC and MARVEL blocks could nicely be rolled into the one (albeit well beaten-up) DEE CEE MARVILLE block.
I wanted the blocks to say something about John and the two comic companies respectively... aside from the beaten-up aspect of DEE CEE MARVILLE, I wanted the block to hint at those companies' stock-in-trade - Super-heroes!
John's online forum name is COMMANDO FORCES, for reason's which are obvious to anyone who knows him. Hopefully my intentions for his 'block' shouldn't need much more explaining. For the DEE CEE MARVILLE block, I wanted it to look as much a possible like a cape flowing over the shoulders of a hero, almost immediately that dictated a very Art Deco style, evocative of old movie theatres.
By this point I've switched into Google Sketch-up to muck about with the architecture, mainly because if we decide to change the POV, I haven't got to reconstruct the difficult curvature on that art Deco styled block... but it wasn't there that my main problem would be!
I had inadvertently created, by virtue of the military style helmet, a very phallic looking building... "could you put some sort of roof sports complex/airport style thing somewhere around/on that part?". Thankfully we caught it and had a chance to make a suitable alteration.
The only other thing John wanted was "More gore on those bodies." I guess the super-hero fan in me was just subconsciously trying to limit the damage to all those "good guys", but, you've got to give the client what they want!
I'd been concerned over Dredd's footing and so I added in Reed Richards, utlising his 'rubbery' consistency to nicely fill in the space between Superman and WonderWoman.
After showing the last version to John, I couldn't help but think we'd lost the 'Military' in the styling of 'Burdis Block' in favour of Miners or worse still, Doozers!
The easiest way to show him some alternatives was a little fly-around movie taken out of Sketch-up. I can't advocate strongly enough the time saving aspects of this program for me, where previously (hours of projecting the perspective correctly) would have ended up making me want to stab myself in the head.
Throughout the process, there had been dissatisfaction on both our parts over the wording of Dredd's proclamation, neither of ours had been punchy enough. John had started a forum topic to ask for help and there had been some great and some very witty suggestions, but it wasn't until my good pal and Fractal Friction co-contributer Chris Askham suggested a short and sweet "When are you CREEPS gonna learn?", that either John or myself found a 'fit' for the illustration.
We we're all happy until John posted my initial sketch in the same forum topic...
PJ Holden (who has always been insightful and helpful to me from my very earliest foray into the comics business) suggested the even shorter and IMO 'sweeter' "WHO'S NEXT?". Sorry Chris, but you know when something's right.
With the final version okayed by John, I turned the 'pencils' into a 'blueline' ready to print out. Using another tip I'd picked up from PJ, I left the 'speech' to print out in Black for crispness in the final artwork.
I inked the dead super-heroes first because I knew there would be a lot of work in that part, in fact it took most of a morning to do, but after getting Dredd inked in, it was all fairly plain sailing and came together quite quickly!
I sent a scan of the final thing to John yesterday and I'm pleased to say he's very happy with it and looking forward to seeing it in the flesh at Kapow!
I guess that's it really, other than to ask: "WHO'S NEXT?"
This year, I was pretty unprepared and not that confident about my portfolio, perverse then, that I was the most relaxed I have been at any of the three BICS I have attended.
It was really good to see old friends and make new ones, so, thanks to everyone for a great weekend!
The highlights for me, amongst many fabulous chats with too many cool people to mention here (for fear of missing anyone out) were:
1. I got to see a copy of Sci-Fi Art Now which I have the above illustration featured in, alongside some heavyweights of the genre. John Freeman has put together a cracking coffee table book, the kind I would have poured over as a child. The book is currently only £13.99 so please go buy a copy!
2. The slightly awe inspiring incident when I decided to ask Dave Gibbons whether he'd mind looking at my portfolio. He really liked my work and felt that on the whole it was nice stuff particularly facial expressions, it was just there were a few small things letting me down, one of which I had done repeatedly. Tangents.
So, what is a tangent with respect to comic art and why is this bad?
It's a situation where a line in your panel creates a tangent to the border or another feature or line in your panel as with this example here.
The problem is that it can flatten a panel because you lose depth when a line runs into another that should look like it is in another plane of the image.
Forget for a moment that the arm is a little anatomically dodgy, the major factor spoiling the composition of the panel is at the shoulder where the inked line meets the border.
The slightly frustrating thing is, they are pretty easy to avoid in this instance by simply having the panel border crop the figure or alternatively allow enough space away from the panel edge.
It's pretty clear to see the massive improvement not only in how the eye is not drawn to the panel border, but in the composition also.
Honestly, it's just a little careless. It was discussed elsewhere but is relevant here, as an artist, you instinctively know when something is wrong, you can see it even if you don't quite know what it is.
More often than not, it takes someone else to point it out, in my case Dave Gibbons pointed it out repeatedly within my portfolio, much to my embarrassment, but as he wisely said, "You'll never do it again, will you?" and I certainly hope not to.
Tangents can occur within the panel too, and it's a little tricky to describe in words, hopefully the quick sketches that Dave did for me to illustrate the concept will help any interested party to understand the potential pitfall.
There are a long and tough set of concepts that need to be bore in mind when laying out a page of sequential art, and it is easy to forget something you know, or should be proficient at.
Something as simple as the breaking down a panel into three planes.
My panel here is suffering from more than that but the fix is simple if we look at the quick sketch Dave did to remind me how I could have avoided most of the problems.
Black placement and line weight become much easier to decide upon when the panel is broken down in this way.
It's simple, logical and creates greater depth within the panel. Irritatingly it's something I've fallen foul of before, again, I hope to never make the same mistake again.
Finally Dave gave me a tip on how to hold my brush, there's no need for puerile or childish jokes, this is a serious matter and will give you greater control over your line for fine detail. very simply put, hold your brush upright.
It's a Chinese technique and the name Dave told me for it escapes me for the moment, as does the name of a classic EC cartoonist my work reminded Dave of.
Encouraged that Dave Gibbons, that's Dave Gibbons folks, liked my work I approached another couple of editors on the Sunday, one of whom told me that my portfolio was the best he'd seen all weekend. Humbled, chuffed etc. I left Birmingham far more confident, happy and inspired than when I arrived.
To go along with the Lawmaster I made a while ago in Google Sketch-Up, I've built a section of Mega-City One. I've invested some time making vehicles and zooms and bits and pieces to help me frame my panels for a Judge Dredd strip by Lee Robson that I've blogged a little about before.
Click image for a huge, zoom-able version
This is still a work in progress and I'll probably use different views than the one shown here, but that's the beauty of a simple 3D package, I make this once, then I can move things around for the best framing of each panel without having to reconstruct, redraw and redo all those little details again and again. Admittedly, I will to some extent, because I will only be using the exported images as under-lays for each of the panels.
A long time between posts... and I really can't remember what has kept me away so long! This post is my 300th, by the way!
This month's art competition on the 2000ad forum is to design a poster for the upcoming Dredd movie. I'm supposed to be working on a multitude of other things, and so this concept that I had been noodling with probably won't get finished more than this.
Quick sketch for a project I'm thinking of submitting something to. It depends whether I can make this concept work as to whether I bother or not. What you've got here is a B-movie sci-fi spoof, a silly alien monster, and a sexy astronaut lady.
What more could you want? That's a rhetorical question by the way!
I'm thinking of having it as a B-Movie poster like this one from all the way back when I started this blog (my second ever post).
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...
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.
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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!
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.
The next topic for DrawerGeeks is Spider-man. I've not only gone overboard on this, I've taken a whole life raft with me (and we've both got carried away!). Yes, I've scripted, sketched and provisionally lettered this two-page strip. These are the pencil roughs ready to tighten-up. I've got a lot to do before Friday as I want this fully coloured for submission also!
If you'd rather wait for the final lettered strip to appreciate the thing in full, please look away now!
I think it's pretty clear what's going on - just a little gag suggested by Matt.
I wanted some strip work other than Dredd and 2000Ad related stuff in my (comics) portfolio - hopefully I'll get to show this at the Birmingham International Comics Show this year. My heart is definitely still in 2000AD, but I need to consider other avenues and Spidey has always been one of my other favourites.
I did an initial sketch based upon John's original brief:
In Dredd's world, towering apartment Blocks are often named after famous people, sometimes for satirical reasons, sometimes equally as a tribute to that person. I felt that DC and MARVEL blocks could nicely be rolled into the one (albeit well beaten-up) DEE CEE MARVILLE block.
By this point I've switched into Google Sketch-up to muck about with the architecture, mainly because if we decide to change the POV, I haven't got to reconstruct the difficult curvature on that art Deco styled block... but it wasn't there that my main problem would be!
Throughout the process, there had been dissatisfaction on both our parts over the wording of Dredd's proclamation, neither of ours had been punchy enough. John had started a forum topic to ask for help and there had been some great and some very witty suggestions, but it wasn't until my good pal and Fractal Friction co-contributer Chris Askham suggested a short and sweet "When are you CREEPS gonna learn?", that either John or myself found a 'fit' for the illustration.
So, what is a tangent with respect to comic art and why is this bad? 
Forget for a moment that the arm is a little anatomically dodgy, the major factor spoiling the composition of the panel is at the shoulder where the inked line meets the border.
Honestly, it's just a little careless. It was discussed elsewhere but is relevant here, as an artist, you instinctively know when something is wrong, you can see it even if you don't quite know what it is.
Something as simple as the breaking down a panel into three planes.
It's simple, logical and creates greater depth within the panel. Irritatingly it's something I've fallen foul of before, again, I hope to never make the same mistake again.
It's a Chinese technique and the name Dave told me for it escapes me for the moment, as does the name of a classic EC cartoonist my work reminded Dave of.
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4 
6 
