Books!

Once upon a time publishers sent us illustrators copies of the books we had worked on as a matter of duty, these days the complimentary copies are less forthcoming. This may well be down to publishers being understaffed and overworked rather than some conspiracy, of course. Luckily I have Wendy Dye of the Art Agency to hunt down the books I've worked on, and this morning something I did four years ago finally arrived in book form. Well done Wendy!

Before I get to that here's some other books that have turned up. The Merlin books I've blogged about a few times here are pictured above and below. The designer did a nice thing for the chapter headings, chopping my illustrations. Below you can see the scattered mix of text, comic strip and straight illustration that I was playing with. It's a shame this series got cancelled (due to some supermarket deal rather than the reception to the books I'm told) as I would have liked to continue the experiment.

Another set of books I blogged about turned up recently as well. This is a series of 'junior spy adventures' called The MI Five. This was my first experiment with manga Studio, I tried to use the tight deadline and new tools to give a real 'drive-by-illustration' speed and frantic feel, working without pencils and drawing free hand over thumbnails. In fact the second image here with the bashful boy and girl was my first ever attempt at using Manga studio.

And below is the book that turned up this morning. At the time I did it I had no work and was prepared to turn my hand to anything. Despite the terror that blazed in my head when I was offered a 3-D pop-up, natural history book to be done 'realistically' in water colour, I still said yes.

Each spread required four A3 watercolour paintings with areas that could be removed to reveal the image beneath. I had to work with a paper engineer who had some kind of masterplan I was only partially aware of. I'm not someone who paints with watercolour, so it's fair to say I felt totally out of my depth on this project.

My daughter loves this book now it has arrived, so I'll give it to her. Makes it all worth while.

Watch out Merlin!

The knife is sharpened for Merlin...

Looks like Random House have shelved plans for future Merlin adaptions. I only came onto the project for books 5 and 6 in the series which won't be published for another month or so, but had planned to work on books 7-10. It's a shame because I've enjoyed working on these books and as I've said before I think the approach that we've taken has real benefits for kids who are uneasy with chapter books.

Below are two more examples of how my hasty line work fits around a spread. I hope to modify this approach and use it with some of my own kids' fiction.

An action sequence from Merlin which mirrors the drama of series better than a single still image

These strips hopefully draw kids into the book, get the blood pumping, but you still need to read the text to get the full picture.

More Merlin

I've been tearing through another Merlin book this last week. As I've said before the essence of these is all about speed and simplicity, combining heavy black with comic storytelling (that's Graphic Novel storytelling for those in the publishing business allergic to the term comics).

I tend to rough all these out whilst watching the DVD of the episode, occasionally pausing to take a screen shot, plot out a scene or compare the text of the book to the TV version. Then it's over to Manga Studio for 'ink don't think' approach.

The idea is to decorate the pages with dramatic storytelling that draws in early readers and retains the attention and focus without detracting from the text. Below are a few spreads from the past week that hopefully will do just that.

Spinning plates

After a short interlude for a bout of swine flu I'm back to spinning plates. Mainly alternating between 3 jobs - Merlin, a weekly cartoon for Inside Soap magazine and working my way through a series of 7 comic strips I've written for Weldon Owen. As mentioned before I'm working on the Weldon Owen stuff with Geraint Ford and Faz Choudhury, both are doing some excellent work.

As if that wasn't distracting enough I've had an offer from a rather large publisher who want to develop the "How I Built My Father" strip into a series of books. May come to nothing, but all the same it's an exciting prospect.

Above and below are some examples of Merlin illustrations. Interesting job this, the intention is to mix comic strip and book illustration to make something that will excite 'junior readers', retain their interest and get them reading.
From a personal point of view it allows me to combine two of my great loves - the stark black and white book illustrations of the 50s and 60s (see my Mike Charlton post for an example of this) with comic strip mechanics and comics' use of blacks. Really enjoying this job, but it has to be done at breakneck speed.

Below is an example of my Soapbox cartoons for Inside Soap Magazine. This is a job that Roger Langridge did for many years. Given the readership, the editor didn't want anything too weird and it's very important that the characters are instantly recognisable, so I've kept to a fairly realistic style.

Wizard layouts

Merlin rushing off on some escapade or other

For what seems like an eternity I have been doing layouts and roughs for my latest projects. Eventually I'll get to do some finished art again. These images are from my first Merlin book for Random House, they're not far off finished looking because I wasn't sure how they'd come out myself and wanted to give the BBC folk a clear idea of how they'd look. I do a lot of roughing for jobs like this in Photoshop. It allows me to keep working over and over on the same image, cutting away at the black and adding finer black. Sometimes I rough in Manga Studio for the same reason. If I'm doing a project for myself or one that needs a bit more thought I'll scribble on paper with a 4b and scan in the resulting mess.

The Merlin stuff here all looks very tight. Below is a looser example. This is for a story about Apsley Cherry Garrard that Faz Choudhury and I wrote. Faz will be doing the lion's share of the art on this strip, but I like to stick my oar in and in this case I roughed out how I saw this panel. It was done in Manga Studio with the same cutting in and drawing over the top approach. There are 4 other stories in this series that we're currently working on for Weldon Owen, but the roughs for those are so rough as to be unintelligible to anyone but me. I shall post some examples of the later stages of those stories at some point.

Now though I have some characters from Emmerdale to draw for Inside Soap magazine. I'm livin' the dream!