Storybook 2010

The Doctor Who Storybook 2010 is out now and amongst other delights it features Space Vikings! a strip written by Jonny Morris and drawn by Ian Culbard and me. I was originally commissioned to do the whole strip, but due to workload I'd asked Ian to do the colour. I did the layouts for the strip then got ill and realised that I wouldn't have time to pencil up all the pages. I asked Ian to help me out and take over pencil duties which he did and from there began a weird game of comic strip tennis as we batted the strip back and forth to such a degree that working out who did what is virtually impossible. Ian changed some of the layouts, I changed some of his pencils when I inked the pages, he changed some of the inks as he coloured and just for good measure I changed his colours around several times until I was happy with it.

Below is an example of how things evolved from layouts to pencils to inks and then a colour version.

My wild roughs, thankfully Ian could understand them - the script was lacking rhythm so I added the little viking-ish motifs to punctuate it (I did a Drashig in one actually, and Ian managed to get the TARDIS in this one)

Ian' delightful pencils

...which I then scrawled over with my inks. I adjusted small things here and there because I like a more angular 2 dimensional feel to composition (especially when it comes to positioning scrawny Mr Tennant). Things like that incredible ceiling that Ian did I just painstaking traced - even my mad obsessive approach allows me to realise when someone has done something infinitely better that I could.

This was Ian's first colour version. Nice, but I didn't like the orange

This was my version replacing the orange with red - which Ian hated

and this was the winner - we both liked the blue!

Each page went through this bizarre back and forth process making this a true collaboration and something both of us can be proud of without any trace of arrogance. You see, I don't know who drew this strip because it doesn't look like it was either of us.

Danza

Here's another drawing from the Doctor Who strip I'm doing. There are a lot of characters in the strip. This fella may look a pretty standard Noir character, but as with all the players in this story there's a twist. It will appear in Doctor Who Magazine issue 412, out in August, so all will be revealed then.

KZZOWW!! KZZOWW!! KZZOWW!!

Here's the strip I'm working on at the moment. This is just a colouring experiment to see how it would look given a 1940s newspaper strip look. Can't give away anything about this other than to say it's the Doctor Who story Dan McDaid has written and it's a lot of fun.

Murderous Maths

Here's an image I finished last week for Murderous Maths. This chap is Urgum the axe wieldingbarbarian, created by the brilliant Kjartan Poskitt. Not sure what kind of style I've ended up with for these covers - I think I started out trying to do an approximation of Philip Reeve's original stuff for this series, but I now seemed to have moved a long way from that.

With that out the way I'm now doing layouts for a 10 page Doctor Who comic strip that will be a bit of a tribute to a true comic genius. Dan McDaid has written me a mad little story full of genius characters. I'm also juggling two other comic strips with the help of Geraint Ford and Faz Choudhury. I'm trying not to keep using the word busy in all my posts, so I'll just say that I'm... fully occupied.

Space Vikings and Spy Kids

Here's some examples of what I've been doing over the past month. The top image is from the Doctor Who Storybook strip which Ian Culbard and I have been doing together.  I will do a lengthy post to try explain how this worked once the book is out and I don't risk spoiling the story - the basic idea was that Ian would take my layouts and thumbnails and turn them into pencils before I inked them and he coloured. Got a bit more complicated than that, but was a lot of fun to do and I know I've learn a lot from doing it. Aaaand most importantly - the strip looks good.

Below are some examples from the two M.I.Five books I've been illustrating.  Sort of Famous Five meets Spy Kids. The still was all about being able to do them quickly in Manga Studio and give them a dynamic feel that had a mix of old school book illos and comic art.

The top three were done before Space Vikings and are much looser, the two below were done after Space Vikings and the effect the tightening up of the inking for that strip had on my approach shows in these illos. Think I prefer the quicker looking stuff

His Mother's Eyes

Managed to do a quick HUZZAH!! last night. HUZZAH!!'s been gathering dust as the main players have got too busy to contribute, the same is true of HUZZAH!! NOIR.  Although I've finished my strip for the Doctor Who Storybook 2010 and am nearing the end of my work on the MI Five books and Murderous Maths, I have to launch straight into a new 10 page strip for Doctor Who Magazine plus I have to do The Death of Caesar strip, so not much time to HUZZAH!! on the horizon.

My latest HUZZAH!! makes the main characters appear like children caught in the middle of a hostile divorce, pawns in a game. It also tells us that at some point in the past there was at least one night of passion between the woman with no eyes and the man we never see.

Who's that meant to be?

Too busy to blog. I've been inking pages for the 2010 Doctor Who Storybook. I can't put more than a tiny peek up here before it hits the shops. I've had some expert assistance with these images, more on that when I can write a full blog post about about this strip. So here's a glimpse of the inks - one face you will hopefully recognise and another you probably wont.

One man HUZZAH!!

Bennett the bleeder

Here's a bit more from The Man Out Of Time. It's a web comic for an American web comic site, hopefully they'll like it and I'll get to do it as an ongoing strip. What? Another webcomic? I hear you say. Well, yeah, and this is a kind of one-man HUZZAH!! I have a clear idea about what's going on, but I'm trying use the good things from the HUZZAH!! process to give this one a spontaneity. Yeah, making it up as I go along would be a fair description. I'll make time to finish the pitch and send it over next month. 

This is the front piece, sets out the 60s TV retro style and limited palette 

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!

HUSSAR!!

Here's this month's Doctor Who magazine illo, third in the series of McCoy pics. I know I put this up before, but I was a bit premature as the issue wasn't out yet. Anyway, here it is back again with the 'how to do it in three easy stages' bit below.

Stage one was my first scribble which in a break from tradition actually worked and seemed to fit the brief. I was asked to include Sylvester McCoy's Doctor and the charge of light brigade, not something that immediately seemed suitable to my simplified vector style.

Stage two was another more detailed rough which I submitted for approval. I scanned this rough at 400 dpi and brought into photoshop.

Stage three - I did some tighter drawing in photoshop, resolving figure drawing and gestures then began clicking away with vectors making these cut-out shapes. Afterwards I added a little texture with a brush tool.

Draw Serge

This was a very quick sketch I did this morning for Draw Serge, a blog started by Jonathan Edwards where the idea is that artists... erm... draw Serge. The great Serge Gainsbourg that is.

After I spent the weekend putting up stud walls and plastering I found that my hands were really clumsy this morning, I felt like a gorilla threading a needle when I started trying to draw, and - given that Serge looks like his face was drawn with clumsy hand - I thought doing a sketch of him would be a great way to start the day. I found some photo ref and then gave myself half an hour to do it.

Great idea for a blog, I look forward to seeing what everyone else does. And if you haven't ever bothered to explore the wonder of Serge Gainsbroug's music then do yourself a favour let this be where you start.

Bloody Work

This my new job, it's series of historical style comic strips for a company who are new to graphic novels. I'm writing and drawing these. There will be a series of different topics aimed at kids, but hopefully they'll have a bit of emotional and graphic punch. This is like the flipside to the Horrible Histories approach - HH set out to make you laugh this will (hopefully) make your hair stand on end and your eyes pop out. 

This first strip (Caesar in case you hadn't guessed) has ended up sandwiched between two Doctor Who strips I'm drawing (although I have a little help on one of those - more on that later) and I still have a children's book to illustrate, a Horrible Histories cover to colour and two stud walls to put up, so I better be getting on.