Long John B*****

Page Three. That's the end of that chapter - I'm afraid I'll have to leave H.G.'s adventures hanging in the air there for a while. I hope to get a couple more pages done (Family Pet) before the end of the month and show the project to a few people before I start on a three month four book illustration marathon.

I will of course be doing research into dysfunctional family gatherings over the next few days, so I'll still be working on Dinlos and Skilldos. 

More Smells

Here's page two of H.G. Smells. I wasted much of yesterday (my first day off work) designing a flowery wallpaper for the Smells' kitchen only to realise, after I'd pasted it onto the page, that it was so busy looking that it gave me vertigo. Many years ago in my twisted youth I may have thought this was a desirable effect, now I just want to be readable. 

I'll crack on with page 3 now.

Wallace

Faz Choudhury asked to see an example of my painting, so I thought I'd stick one of my portraits up here. This chap is Nick Wallace, a good friend of mine and a small part of the inspiration for Carcrashman. I guess there are some similarities in the way they look. But whilst Carcrashman's cockeyed inebriety has an ugly cocksure edge Mr Wallace would never be so crass as be sure of anything.

More Dinlos

Here are a couple of images from two other Dinlos stories. The top one is a panel from page two of Family Pet. The thing is called Pet, the girl is called Petula, her Mum runs a hairdressers - what more do you need to know? The other one is a sketch of Carcrashman, a kind of a superhero-ish cross between Jeremy Clarkson and Sebastian Dangerfield - a twat with an education, a love of cars and a drink problem. 

I was going to stick them up as they were until I realised there was a shortage of colour on here, so now there is some red. The Carcrashman* pic looked a bit blank so I put a few lines from the story on there.

*Apologies to Scott Gray if this seems a bit insensitive, just dawned on me then. And if you are reading this Scott, I hope you make a swift recovery. 

H.G. Smells

This is page one of H.G. Smells. I've attempted to accurately recreate a hot September first-day-back-at-school in the 70s on Grove road in Parkstone (if anyone knows it). Obviously this is home time. The stories should run in a kind of real time so this story is happening a few hours before Kackernory is telling his bedtime story not too far away. I feel that the characters in this story are already well rounded in my imagination and in my scribbled notes and layouts, hopefully this comes across in this first page. 

From the top

Here y' go, I've put them up in the right order to make it easier to read. Also allowed me to correct a typo that's been driving me mad.

The Lightning Fist

Finally found time to do page three this weekend. I was due to have a week away from paying jobs to concentrate on getting some pages of Dinlos done, sadly that week got crushed by deadlines. 

Anyhow... this is a completed strip for Dinlos and I'm fairly happy with it. It stands up on it's own as a three page strip and I think will work well as a chapter of the novel. I'm striving for a balance between immediacy and the kind of depth that a novel offers. Hopefully this strip tells its story at a glance, but will also reward closer examination as part of the novel. Well, that's the plan anyway!

Worst case scenario - it's some funny pictures and strange words. No harm in that, eh?