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).

Where have all the Dinlos gone?

I keep promising that I'll get back to Dinlos, but I just seem to be swimming against a tide of my own ambition. I have so many projects either up and running, with publishers, in development or just rattling around in my head that Dinlos has slipped down the pecking order this year. 

However it is still inching along. After doing that bunch of pages last year I realised that the heavily textured style was far too time consuming for an entire novel, so I'm going to keep that style just for Kackernory and instead I'll be using a flatter two colour process for the rest - more in keeping with the 1970s annuals that the book aims to imitate really. Above is an early experiment in redoing H.G.Smells. 

How much I get done this year will depend on the success of my other projects, so if you see a lot of Dinlos suddenly appear on here you can safely assume that the other projects have all gone tits.

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?

On the ropes

Sunday - I've just spent the morning finishing off page two of The Lightning Fist (one page to go), now I'll spend the afternoon doing the Doctor Who spot art (the deadline is tomorrow). The last two panels here may be a bit rushed, or it may be that I'm just picking fault with the page now it's finished. I often think I'm doing something brilliant when I've got my head down working only to decide I'm actually a talentless fraud when the job is finished. Guess that's the fragile ego of the artist.

The Cooraben Devel

I'm spinning plates here at the moment, but I'm determined to keep Dinlos moving amidst my landslide of deadlines. Here are 3 panels from page two of Kackernory. Top and bottom of the page aren't done yet. In the top panel Jesus wakes up to find himself in a boxing ring facing the Cooraben Devel (that's the Barefoot Parangoo God of Boxing for anyone who isn't paying attention!), in the bottom panel he just gets beaten up some more.

Reading the last blog entry I realise that I sound quite apologetic for writing this story in Kackernory's peculiar mix of William Barnes's Dorsetese and pidgin Romany. I'm not. These are just two pages from a large novel and all becomes clear later... Well, maybe not all, but....

These three panels took longer than they should have because I spent a while ensuring that everything was centered - Cooraben Devel's nose, the ref's nose, the ring etc. You may notice I've done something similar on page one. This is an idea I'm using for this story to get away from the filmic, camera shot look that predominates comic panels. I spend so little of my life looking at the world through a camera lens that I fail to see why I should make my stories look as if they are seen through one. In the case of this story it has an unsettling symmetry that helps the feeling of creepy bedtime stories and mythic imaginings.

Settle down me tawnie yeks...

At last a page from Dinlos and Skilldos appears on the blog! This is a page I'm (almost) happy with, it's page one of a three page strip that appears throughout the book, I guess there will be 6 or 7 Bedtime Stories in all. It's not typical of the book as a whole and I apologise if it verges on the unintelligible. Hopefully you find the language fun even if you don't fully grasp the meaning. As someone whose idea of 'reading' comics as a dyslexic child was just following the pictures I wanted to have at least one strip in Dinlos where the words decorated the illustrations rather than the other way round. 

Kackernory speaks in a kind of pidgin-Romany, that may not even be understandable to some Gypsies. There isn't any standard written Romany, it's a spoken language that varies from one area to another and from one country to the next. All the same I'd hope that Gypsies from a number of countries would recognise enough of the words to have as clear a grasp of what's going on as an English reader.

Like I say, the rest of the book is set out to be very immediate and easy to read so this is the exception.

I've been using this page to experiment with different techniques and trying to avoid ending up with a total dog's dinner. I doubt there will many pages with quite this amount of texture and competing ideas on, but I've learnt a lot doing it. 

I am a Dinlo

Had a bit of a disaster yesterday - it seems I accidentally saved my lo res crop of the Kackernory titles over the file containing the whole page of artwork. As a result I lost a whole page of finished artwork... forever. With stiff upper lip and socks pulled up to my hips I spent the evening redrawing the tile panel. It gave me the chance to fix a few things and add a few things. I've replaced the horrid comic sans lettering with one of Mr Langridge's lovely fonts (thanks, Roger) and I've fiddled about with the title so it stands off the page a bit better.

Actually, I just dropped a grey cut out of my titles onto the page and that's where it landed. I left it there. It made me think of carnies and river gypsies, which, given that the story is about a Gypsy family, is perfect. In fact it has a daubed look that I remember from my own Grandfather's decorations on his wagon. He never did any lettering because he couldn't read or write, but he painted flowers and spirals onto everything in that classic Victorian fairground style. Victory snatched from the jaws of defeat.  

Dinlos are GO!!!

Our time traveling hero flees his emotionally disturbed step-dad 

Some Romany jib from Grandad

Pearl, her mum and Roy from the grocers.

Well, not quite "GO!!!", but at least there's some panels from Dinlos and Skilldos on here now. I'm so busy with Murderous Maths and Horrible Histories that I haven't got time for my delinquent characters. So until I get time to finish a few pages I'm putting up these title panels. 

I've procrastinated to such a degree over this project it's miracle these pictures haven't had all the life sucked out of them. The original plan for this was fairly simple: I wanted to write about childhood in a medium that was capable of doing it believably without turning it into a collection of wise author's memories, either the fondly remembered or haunting nightmarish variety, and neither did I want to go down the Blue Remembered Hills or Paddy Clark Ha Ha road of mimicking childhood for effect. To me the solution was to write a novel inside a Whizzer and Chips Annual!

Hey! I happen to think it's a good idea! Obviously, the only way I can demonstrate it's good idea is to actually do it - I've written some fantastic novels, screenplays and comics that have never made it further than the triangular fossas of my beer-addled chums. Of course drawing and writing 144 pages is a big ask and finding the money to publish a hardback of such a book is highly unlikely. So the plan is to self publish it in six issues and see if I can get it put together in a book some point in the future. Two of my addled chums, Nod and Beth, have offered to put up some money and all I need now is the time and application to get it done.

Back to these title panels - they look a bit scruffy. That's partly intentional, I want this to feel grubby, and also it's because I'm not Roger Langridge or Chris Ware, and I can't do that brilliantly integrated period typography thing that they do. I've kept as much of the spring-loaded Whizzer and Chips feel as I could (after all that's why I'm doing it in this format and style) but I've recently added a half tone element to give it extra atmosphere. I wanted to steer away from horrible painterly modeling or too much digital whizz-kiddery, so I've scanned some of my 4 year old daughter's paintings and been using them like a kind of letratone. 

I won't go into the stories themselves yet because I'm a firm believer that the more you talk about an idea before it's done the more you suck the life out of it. Hence most of my ideas are like dried fruit.