The Eleventh Doctor

I had to have a go at drawing Matt Smith as the Doctor. Bit harder than I thought. Still, hopefully some nice editor type person will pay me money to get it right at some point.

HUZZAH!!

HUZZAH!! is a turn based sequential art game (a what?). It's like a comic strip game of consequences: each artist draws a page or section of a page and then the next artist takes over and continues the story and leaves it for the next artist... and so on. The previous version of this game Who Killed Round Robin ran from January 1st 2008 to December 31st 2008, Huzzah will run until December 31st 2009 and can be found here.

So far there are 8 of us on board for HUZZAH!: Ian Culbard, Dave Taylor, Colin Fawcett, Chris Rodenhurst (Sketchybeast), Faz Choudhury, Matt Brooker (D'Israeli), Paul Harrison-Davies and me. A great collection of artists with a mind-boggling variety of styles.

I've just done my first plate which was fun/hair raising and I'm hooked already. 

Popeye

Happy new year! I'm so busy right now that I'll struggle to get much Dinlos work done this month. In the meantime here's a quick Popeye doodle in the scribbly style I'm using for the book I'm currently illustrating. I've had to borrow my wife's fountain pen as the pens I ordered haven't turned up yet. She's had the pen all her life and as a result it's shaped to her writing style and in my hand has a mind all of its own.

Popeye is, of course, out of copyright in the EU as of today. If you're looking for something to spend those Christmas book tokens on you could do worse than Fantagraphics' collections of Segar's early Popeye strips. Good stuff.

And I'm also telling all and sundry to get a copy of Gus and his Gang by Chris Blain. It's published by First Second and is one of the best of the 'new wave' French Graphic novels. It's basically a bunch of macho romance stories about cowboys and their troubled love lives punctuated with brief bank jobs and train robberies, all drawn with a gunslinger-quick swish of the nib. One of the best things I read in 2008.

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.

Wallace

Faz Choudhury asked to see an example of my painting, so I thought I'd stick one of my portraits up here. This chap is Nick Wallace, a good friend of mine and a small part of the inspiration for Carcrashman. I guess there are some similarities in the way they look. But whilst Carcrashman's cockeyed inebriety has an ugly cocksure edge Mr Wallace would never be so crass as be sure of anything.

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. 

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.