The Brush Tool

Baron Kazam returns!

Fitted in a new HUZZAH!!, you can go and see it here. One of the things that I gain from doing HUZZAH!! is that it gives me chance to experiment. On this occasion I decided to do the whole thing using the brush tool in Manga Studio on a light setting. Not an ideal drawing tool really and I wasn't happy with the finished page. I quite like these close up screen shots of the work in progress though. In a sense looking at these images at this size (click on them for full size!) it's like removing the illusion that these marks are real brush marks and instead showing the digital nature of the marks.

General Kvar

Durante

We need to fix a name for this giant blue baby of indeterminate sex. We can't keep calling him/her the Gestalt Heir.

What a helmet!

Here's the other panel from my last Huzzah featuring the Baron. I've often wondered how my flat colour with no black keyline style might work for a comic strip and this worked out ok. With the aging and texture added these Baron images remind me a bit of Peter Blake paintings. Perhaps the answer to making this style work for comics is to ensure my characters all have plenty of targets and lightning flashes - maybe a strip about wrestlers is in order.

Is that...?

Yes it is. It's a new HUZZAH!! page! Well, I say new... it's an ancient looking page in keeping with the dust that's been collecting on HUZZAH in recent months.

Mother and child

Aww, a tender moment from HUZZAH!! Who could fail to be touched by the sight of an eyeless witch who inhabits a young girl's eyes finally being reunited with her 20 foot tall, blue, glowing, male daughter? 

Does the child recognise the presence of its mother? Does Baron Kazam suspect? The Baron's mission was to bring mother and daughter together, I wonder if this is how he imagined it? Maybe all the Baron's adventures are as twisted as this.

I had sworn to stay clear of HUZZAHs until I'd finished my current workload, then convinced myself I could take a few hours out to add this to the story. Bit of a late night, but the story must be told!

Baron Kazam takes off

Here's my latest HUZZAH!! (above and below). It's really rattling along now. Faz Choudhury is next up, can't wait to see how he follows this! I'll be away for a week, so it'll be fascinating to see where HUZZAH!! is by the time I get back. 

As requested by Paul Harrison Davies  here's a 'how it's done in 3 easy steps' thing. Prior to the first stage I would have done a thumbnail on a piece of paper - no idea where that went, I'm surrounded by mountains of paper as I'm in the middle of a couple of projects.

I always paste the plate that proceeds mine onto my page (in this case Dave Taylor's revelation of a baby in a sphere inside Xog)) so I'm working as if it is part of the same page.

Until I come up with a better solution I'm inking in Photoshop. My Huzzah plate on page 7 was done with pen and paper, but all the rest have been done like this. It's handy when you change your mind as often as I do

I wanted to use limited flat colours but also wanted to stick to Dave's palette to keep the continuity on the page, so I stopped the line work and messed about until I came up with this Mondrian looking colour layout. Also the muted colour and the dreamy motion of the page worked as a great contrast to the dazzling colours in the next panel (top of this post) where the Baron hurtles in the air clinging to the remote womb. Actually I did that big magenta flying baron image first and tried to work towards it. I'm really not the most methodical of people.

The Old Man's Back Again

Baron Kazam

The Old Man's Back Again has become a sort of theme tune for Baron Kazam, I end up humming it every time I see him. It's one of those booming, mythic, Sergio Leone landscape sounding Scott Walker songs (I could just have easily chosen The Seventh Seal by Scott Walker, I guess. That one even features a knight). 

From page one of The Inverted Coma

Always annoying when folk don't update their blogs and I'm getting a bit slack myself just now thanks to my mountainous workload. So, with that in mind, and the fact I'm going to be flat out busy for another fortnight before I go on holiday, I thought I'd do some bumper blogging! The indian pic is a panel from the Future Shock type thing that I've been kicking around for the past couple of years. Thought I ought to finish it and send it over to Tharg really. 

Below is one of those "how to in 3 quick easy steps" things. I couldn't resist jumping in and nudging the HUZZAH story on the other day and managed to knock out three panels in double quick time.

Here comes the knight

Have no fear, Zhadira, back up is on its way! Or not. 

This is my latest HUZZAH!! page. I wanted to introduce Baron Kazam at some point and this seemed like a good place for us to find him. The Baron leapt into my mind as soon as we started HUZZAH, he seems very familiar. I like that, he triggers all sorts of associations in my head - Don Quixote, Flash Gordon, Arzach, Dan Dare, Baron Munchausen etc etc - a kind of conglomeration of 30's sci fi, 70s fantasy and chivalric romance. I can't say too much in case I bias my fellow HUZZAHers, because who he is and what he does will be as much down to them as it is to me. He seems to be light years away from Zhadira and her problems at the moment, I quite like that.

I went for a bright, flat coloured look, something with a pulp sci fi comic feel. Even the aliens look a bit 1950s in places. The fight booth is based on Ron Taylor's Boxing Booth that appears at the Dorset Steam Fair every year.