Paint

Last weekend I took a busman's holiday and did some painting with the kids. As many of you know this is where creativity and destruction become the same thing. Great fun.

Above is a speed portrait of Edie (3 minutes I guess) done with the worst brush and paints I've ever used and under the threat of Oby destroying/creating it at any moment. I've never been obsessed with materials the way most comic artists are, perhaps that's why I was happy to embrace digital inks. All mark making is artificial to some degree and choosing a pen or brush to make an exact mark is no different than creating a pen in Manga Studio to do the same in my opinion.

I kept all the children's paintings, the marks they make are so fresh and wild they make great textures for my own work (multiply layer in photoshop etc). The red and purple composition that Oby is working on here ended up providing texture for Gerraint Ford's cover to one of the Infinity books we've been working on. It's here, take a look.

In the past I've used Edie's painting to create textures for Kackernory, H.G. Smells and Family Pet (click the labels for examples).

The Family Pet

Back to Dinlos - this is another panel from Family pet. I've had a bit of head scratching session over this because the artwork is getting more and more complex and I can't decide if this is a good thing or not. 

Perhaps some of the other stories will lend themselves to a quicker more cartoony style. Family Pet is supposed to have a bit of Gothic Horror about its everyday tale of a girl and her pet.

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 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.