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).

I got the blues (and the purples)

I'm currently co writing 5 strips for Weldon Owen with Faz Choudhury which I'll shortly start drawing, plus I've started work on the BBC Merlin books and some caricatures for Inside Soap magazine. I've also squeezed in a couple of things for myself. Above is one of a number of colour tests I've been trying out for Dinlos (this is a redone panel from H.G.Smells). And below is a tiny peek at my 4 page strip for the Comica/Cape/Observer Graphic Short Story Prize.

They insist on printed pages rather than digital files, and I've had a nightmare reproducing these colours on paper. If (when) I lose I'll post the whole strip on the blog and you can judge for yourself. Actually, I think this competition is a great idea, I can't wait to see other people's stories and doing it has certainly given me some freedom to experiment. I feel like someone's mum saying "we're all winners", but if doing this forces you to do what you want and get it done then the prize itself is secondary.

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.

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.

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. 

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.