For Sale

I'm putting artwork up for sale in the coming months. I have some original art for sale and hopefully I'll be doing some prints of any popular pieces I've done. If there's anything you want to buy as original art (that includes the Doctor Who, Roy of the Rovers and Judge Dredd stuff as well as any paintings you see on the blog) or if there's something you'd like a print of (obviously much of my recent work has been done digitally) then contact me and let me know, either through the blog comments or via email. Above is a jumble of some of the images I've stuck on this blog in the last year or two.

The Seven Crystal Balls

The Forbidden Planet International blog asked for drawings of favourite French comic characters, so I thought I'd have a go at a very un-ligne claire Tintin cover (yes, I know he's Belgian, but it's in French for heaven's sake). Seven Crystal Balls is a favourite of mine and contains one of the rare but brilliant spooky moments in Tintin's adventures when Rascar Capac, the Inca mummy, slips into the room of the sleeping boy reporter. I thought it might be fun to render the story as a gothic horror and Tintin as a grittier character. Using the Mignola Gothic-style covers as inspiration I took a few of the scribbles from the sheet below, pasted them together in Photoshop, printed them out as blueline and inked them up.

Actually the sheet below is the nearest I get to a sketchbook, I've never kept one and don't know what to do with them if I'm given one. There are three unpaid jobs on this sheet fighting for my attention, in the centre is a sketch for an article I've just written for Vworp Vworp! magazine about Mick McMahon's Junkyard Demon art (I'll post the final image at a later date) , on the left is as far as I got with my Absinthe Frappe image and the rest is Tintin scribble.

Something old, something new...

Another excellent season of Doctor Who ends with a big ol' finale-doodah and I'm drawing my latest Who strip. Happy days. Above is an image I did for the beeb of one of my favourite finales - that whole Doomsday-Doc-and-Rose-on-opposite-sides-of-reality thing. Below is a pic of new Doc Matt Smith from my latest roughs for the DWM Xmas story. Had to ditch this image as it didn't flow so well in the scene (see that's comics' professionalism for you).

I started drawing strips for DWM in 2008 (I'd been writing for them since 2006), my first task was to design a strip version of Donna, played by Catherine Tate, for the two strips I was going to do - Immortal Emperor and Time of my Life. Here's what I sent over:

The next job was to design a terrecotta android version of Chinese Emperor Qin. Here are a couple of those designs, more of these feature in the commentary at the back of The Widow's Curse Graphic Novel.
And that's one the pages of pencils I did for that strip. I pencil in photoshop for strips like this. Below is one of those step by step things showing a page go from from roughs, to pencils, to inks, to colour. The inks here are done in the traditional pen and paper method.

The Angel Gang

More old stuff I'm afraid, this is the Angel Gang from a Gordon Rennie story that featured in the Judge Dredd Lawman of the Future summer special (I think!). I guess this was from 1996. WJC recently did an Angel Gang image and I felt inspired to do one myself, unfortunately I haven't got the time and seeing as I had to draw them for the comic all those years ago I dug out some of the old pages. I've done a quick colouring job on them to spruce them up a bit. Quite shocking how Mick McMahon-esque these are. In fact, it was partly the feeling that I was walking McM's shadow that put me off wanting to do anymore Dredd for the next 15 years. And in those days anyone who was doing Dredd in anything other than the full acrylic body-builder sheen was probably frowned upon, especially someone doing a cod McM style. The cod McM style had it's day in the sun though in the end.

It's the World Cup (1994)

Why didn't I think to blog about the World cup??? Because people who like comics don't like football and vice versa. Thankfully there are some exceptions (me included) otherwise this post would be a waste of time. 16 years ago I was still drawing Roy of the Rovers for the monthly and we embraced the world cup in the USA in our usual controversial style. England didn't qualify for that world cup, but Roy of the Rovers was represented at the World Cup by 'Delroy of the Rovers', Paul Ntende, who opted to play for his father's home nation Nigeria over his country of birth.

I don't know that I explained last time I blogged about Roy of The Rovers how the strips ran weekly in Shoot Magazine between each issue of the Monthly (this meant the only way to get the full story was to read both). This strip below is a two page strip from Shoot (9th July 1994). Hopefully Titan books will eventually collect all of these stories together.

Looking at these pages again after all this time I can see that I was trying to capture the colourful summery-ness of the World Cup and the blazing light. The panels I like here though are the crowd shots (I didn't realise I'd drawn Captain America before! I think that was my crude way of saying this is America, which in turn stems from my primary associations with America which come from Roy Castle's Record Breakers and the La-la-la la-la-la America scene each week which featured a cartoon of the Cap.)

Digging through the drawers of old stuff I also unearthed this spread from Roy of the Rovers Monthly No17. It has a kind of World Cup theme as it's about Melchester Rovers signing Brazilian World Cup star, Malandro. Again in typical Monthly style we used the arrival of the Brazilian to do a flashback to his upbringing in the Favelas (contrasting with his English counterparts). Malandro's story includes wife beating, drug addiction and the Capoeira - the dance of the knives.

Things of note here are the shift in art style and the sense of unreality, this entire spread is drawn in pencil and oil pastels and I think I was trying for a kind of magic realism (very South American) because this life is a world away from ours and the events in it (murder and violence as daily occurrence) are impossible for anyone to accept without some kind of schism.

Really odd and powerful stuff to be putting out in a comic for kids. Stuart Green (writer/editor) said recently of the ideas in the comic that 'we were ahead of our time', (classic excuse for not selling enough comics). I'm not sure whether that's true or not, but the chances of a comic like this being made for children now is more unlikely than ever.

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.

The Third Policeman

Wish I could put up the cover design I'm working on right now, but I can't. Hopefully I'll be able to reveal all in the next week or two. In the meantime here's something I did under the influence of red wine and sunshine in an attic in Salisbury in 1997. It was intended as a cover illustration for Flann O'Brien's the Third Policeman. I was reminded of the book the other day when watching the finale of that, almost distracting, BBC thing, Ashes to Ashes; both had a similar ending/reveal. Strangely enough, the approach I took for this illustration, sort of Picasso-esque, is representative of the story inside.

I'll try and put up something new next time.

Solipsistic, Norris, adaptions and the FA

This is one of those 'here's what I've been up to' posts. The top image is from the-thing-I-can't-talk-about-yet, not until it goes tits up or gets the final thumbs up from the publisher. The plan with this book is to scan the pencils and shift the levels rather than ink it. I know some people do this very effectively, so if any one has any tips I'm all ears.

I've also just finished a series of strips for the FA. I know I said I'd never draw another football strip after 6 years of doing football comics, but I needed the money and they asked nicely.

I completed the Lovecraft adaption I was writing and the script is winging it's way to the artist.
And this is my bread and butter these days - a weekly cartoon for Inside Soap magazine. This one is from a couple of weeks back and shows a switch to something a bit more design-y and atmospheric.

Next up I have four Horrible Histories covers and a comic strip about the TT, then I start work on a rather wonderful Doctor Who story by Jonny Morris I've just received which will appear in the Christmas edition of Doctor Who Monthly. After that I will be contributing a strip to Solipsistic Pop 3.

Solipsistic Pop 2 is available here. It's a beautifully produced book that smells wonderful and has a gorgeous cover by the very talented Luke Pearson. The whole thing is put together by another talented comic creator Tom Humberstone. The stories are intimate, funny and peculiar. The book introduced me to a number of talents I was shamefully unaware of like Stephen Collins, Kristyna Baczynski, Anna Saunders and Jack Noel plus others I'd heard of but hadn't read like Adam Cadwell and Marc Ellerby.

Contender for my favourite comic ever is Eightball by Dan Clowes and this collection reminded me of the joy there was to be found in Eightball.

Jumble Sales are Holy and Sweet Mystery were probably my favourite stories in Solipsistic Pop 2 - one features Freddie Mercury and his wolves and the other has people weeing on sweets - that's my kind of read.

Mum

Did this drawing of my brilliant Mum today. It's based on a photo of her when she was 17. A giant version of the photo used to sit in the window of Hartley's Photographers on Poole High Street in 1963, much to my Mum's embarrassment. From Hartley's the Photographers to Dinlos the blog, hopefully she won't be embarrassed by this version.

Captain America

Something I fiddled with between jobs today. This is Captain America as seen in the early TV series rather than the Marvel comics version. I'm no expert on the superhero genre, and I doubt anyone will ever offer to let me draw a superhero story given that this is how I choose to see them.

Black and white Dredd

Think I might prefer the uncoloured version of this Dredd pic. Here it is, make your own mind up.

Judge Dredd

I was wondering aloud on Twitter why Dredd ended up with his squat bodybuilder physique today and that prompted me to want to draw the Judge again (the way I see him). It's been a long time, but I really enjoyed doing this. It's so imprinted on my brain. If Tharg happens to see this, now would be a good time to ask me draw Judge Dredd. Mind you, I'd imagine there's quite a queue.