Sontaran!

Aw, bless, it's one of those cuddly, potato-headed, jellyfish bothering dwarves. The full illustration features in this weeks Doctor Who Adventures. I'm sure eagle-eyed who fans will have already spotted who else features. Quick rush out and buy it!

This is the latest in the Terror from Time series, where the chaps at BBC magazines blow up tiny little drawings I did to an enormous scale to scare the kiddies. The magazine is still the best thing your newsagent has to offer for kids. 

The Man Out of Time

Here's a peek at one of the 'other projects' I'm working on. Probably best I don't go into too much detail about it just yet, but when it's finished I'll let you know where it'll appear. 

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.

Franny and the Daleks

Sounds like a decent name for a band. Actually Franny is the hatcheck and gossip girl from the Snake Pit in my latest HUZZAH!!NOIR page. I've written her as a girl who likes the sound of her own voice and thinks aloud, which makes her a fun narrator to write. I tried to set up the next page(s) as open as possible. We're about to hear Franny tell us (and Sleepy) the story of Joel Zieger. Who is he? I haven't a clue. That's the fun of HUZZAH, whoever HUZZAHs next gets to decide.

This page was a bit of a rush job because I have a lot of comic strips to write and draw over the next couple of months and so couldn't give the art the time I wanted. I'm happier with the writing than the art on this page I think.

And the Daleks. Had to take this pic down because it hadn't been published yet. Well, now it has! It's in the latest Doctor Who Magazine and the designer has done a great job of putting the page together (in fact DWM is an incredibly well designed mag, and features some great illustration). As I've probably said many times, the idea behind this style was to make something that sat nicely on magazine pages with bold and fine type. It hasn't always been 100% successful, but this latest one actually looks ok to me.

Sleepy Jackson and Creepy El Dawah!

Bumper week of HUZZAHs from me - 3 pages in a week! Above are pages 9 and 10 of HUZZAH!!NOIR that I've just finished. Features a new character - Loretta Beretta. Also has Sleepy explaining his 'rope-a-dope' brand of investigation. In some ways I'd rather have had more time to sort the artwork out, but I knew what I wanted to say with the characters and that meant hammering out two pages. It's giving me a real opportunity to work out an approach to black and white stuff. At the moment I'm probably putting too much in, be nice to suggest more and draw less. Fun getting there.

Below is page 35 of HUZZAH!! Tried to tie up a few things with the story. With the art I was looking to find a way of doing the gloom without doing it all black or ending up with a page of photoshop airbrush effects. Ended up using the hatching brush in Manga Studio (also in evidence on my latest Noir pages). At the bottom of this post is the black and white, unlettered version. I've been nervous about putting such a predetermined effect on my pages, but I guess if it works it works. Plenty of 'cheating' goes on in comic strip art, don't get me started on... nah, I'll leave that for another day. 

NOIR... HUZZAH!! NOIR!

HUZZAH!! now has a little sibling - HUZZAH!! NOIR. I just managed to do two pages to take us up to page four. Some of the same comic creators from the other HUZZAH feature in this one - Ian Culbard, Dave Taylor, Colin Fawcett, Faz Choudhury, Paul Harrison Davies and me, plus we have  been joined by the very talented Shane Oakley, Sean Longcroft and Dave Shelton. Hopefully we'll add one or two more to the list before the end of the month.

As the title suggests this HUZZAH is set in the world of Film Noir and hard-boiled fiction. This may not immediately seem as well suited to the round robin format as the way-out world of the space epic, but I have high hopes that this may work even better. For a start the setting is more limited and the black and white look more uniform. That's already evident if you compare the first 4 pages of this HUZZAH with the other. By page 4 of HUZZAH we'd already met a whole host of characters and settings with more random ideas than you could shake a science fiction stick at. The Noir version focusses on just one man and his thoughts.

In the two pages I've just done the man is revealed to be Sleepy Jackson, a sauntering ex-boxer searching for his wife/girlfriend. He first appears on Ian's page one, we hear his narrative thoughts - he was once fearless, now all that has changed, now he has reason to fear. Paul took it on and revealed that someone had been taken from him, someone he cared about. 

The thing that struck me about him was that he looked like a real bruiser and yet appeared to have an office desk, kind of a private eye set up, so I stitched the two contradictory elements together to make Sleepy Jackson. Still waters run deep with this fella.

Jackson's search for his gal has led him into some dodgy company, can't wait to see where Faz takes us next...

(and, yeah I got the name from the Aussie band.)

Third Seventh Doctor illustration

This post will be returning next month. :-)

Doctor Who and the Guardian Vectors

Been doing a few spot illustrations for Doctor Who Magazine recently. Given how iconic the 7th Doctor's image is (to DWM readers of course) I decided to go against the idea of trying to do miniature portraits of Sylvester McCoy, after all everybody reading the magazine knows what he looks like, my job is just to make sure you "know it's him". This freed me up to have a bit more fun with these using my vector style. 

The image above is in the latest issue, which also features a wonderful comic strip by Dan McDaid and Sean Longcroft, plus regular art joys from Ade Salmon and Ben Wilshire.

I used to do regular spots for the Guardian in a similar style. Here are a few examples, these all appeared in the Guardian Weekend magazine.

The Dead

Here's my latest HUZZAH page. This is a new beginning in the story, after Ian Culbard blew up Voldar it gave us the opportunity to start a new thread (he was only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!!). Mindful that most of my HUZZAHs have been about piling on tons of exposition to keep the thing making sense, I enjoyed doing something willfully oblique (even I don't know who these people are or what they're talking about). It'll be up to the HUZZAHs that follow this to make sense of it.

Still trying to get to grips with Manga Studio, but I'm having fun along the way and I'm enjoying what it's doing to my comic drawing.

In these two panels without the colour you can see the Manga Studio inks clearer. These are done with the brush setting in the pen tool. I have it set to a large nib and make the big marks first. Anything that gets obliterated as I slodge about with the black can be picked out with white afterwards. 

Lost Count

A Voldarian comes to Count Khadari's rescue

I haven't quite lost count of how many HUZZAHs I've done, but I find it hard to resist when the opportunity arrives. It has to fit in between work and fortunately yesterday I was waiting for approval on some illustrations and so had the chance. 

For anyone who's following the story (God bless you!) it seems like we're approaching the end to many of the storylines that we set out with on Voldar. The first chapter established a prison planet, Voldar, with no visible prisoners, a Galaxy ruled by a mysterious Glass Tsar, a terrible infant monster kept in the prison and crashed ship containing a warrior, Zhadira, and a thief, Pample. 

We got our first glimpse of the space witch (AKA The Hexen Definitive) in chapter one and in chapter two we saw the witch possess a rebellious sightseer, Durante and direct her to Voldar.

Chapter 3 introduces the Baron, an ancient space knight on an ancient quest. His quest we discover is to find the true heir to the Glass Tsar's empire. The infant was hidden in the stomach of a monster called Xog by a secret sect know as the Sisters. The child is preserved inside a remote womb, this device instantly transports the Baron to Voldar.

So what's happening on Voldar? Zhadira is there to rescue her father, Count Khadari (who is imprisoned there) Durante is being guided by the Hexen Definitive to search for the baby she thought dead (she is the mother of the true heir to the Glass Tsar's empire) and below the surface a monstrous heir has been created. 

Into this comes the Baron with the true heir under his arm.

Which brings us up to date - the Baron, in the clutches of the monstrous heir, drops the true heir into its mouth. The two become one Gestalt heir and its evil noise rips the surface of the planet apart. 

And here's where the true nature of the Prison planet is revealed - Voldar is an entire planet imprisoned beneath a vast crust and a network of restraining bolts. As the bolts lose their hold and the surface breaks apart it releases the real prisoners...

Manga Studio inks

These are two examples of the cover inks for a series of kids' books I'm illustrating. They were done in Manga Studio which has freed up my line and sped up my work rate. Comic drawing is not the best way to make a fortune, so it's necessary to find a way of turning out pages at a reasonable pace. I'm hoping this software will speed up my strip work allowing me to take on more strips.

Roy of the Rovers Monthly issue 6

I've been pleasantly surprised by the level of interest in my Roy of the Rovers post, so I'm posting a whole episode and cover - Issue 6 from February 1994. Comic art's all well and good, but comics aren't really comics if you can't read them. Comic art always suggests that the artwork has a life independent of the script - I'm not so sure, I like to see the words and pictures hand in hand. So here is an unabridged episode from Roy of the Rovers monthly, warts and all. And that last page is one major wart *cringe* I can't believe I'm putting it on this blog. Still the fact I'm posting it is proof that story is what matters to me.

And this cover is another example of strange football action - here we see disgruntled teen football star kicking a coke can down the street, sulking. The homeless guy in the funny hat was originally hidden by the free stickers that came with this issue. What a jolly surprise the kids got when the pulled off the free gift!