2000AD Doodles

Fine liners and fat liners, and a bit of brush pen for solid blacks.

Brush pen and Hunt 107 nib.

Hellboy OZComic Sequential Challenge

Just finished this page last night for the Oz Comics sequential fortnightly challenge.

This was a real sod of a page - libraries, skeletons, 10 panels. Actually 10 panels isn't a problem with a well written script and this one was (I've of course deleted all my files and can't find the writer's name. Anthony someone?). It ended up taking much more time than I wanted, working 2 hours a night over 5 days or so.

I didn't think I'd do a post about this one so I didn't do any production scans but my method is pretty much the same for every page I do. Check out this post for more on my methods.

Here are my thumbnails though.

Not very clear but I did change the angle on a couple of panels. Not sure why but there's always a bit of difference between the thumbs and the final page. Especially as I never do the thumbs to scale. these were done on a loose bit of A4 printing paper. You can also see some calculations for splitting the page into 3 panels width ways.

Here my most used tools (minus a Staedtler Mars rubber). So from left to right I have a Hunt 107 (I think) - a nice hard stainless steel nib which does fine lines and can, with pressure, do quite fat lines, a fairly common nib this one but too blackened for me to find out what it is now but it does fatter lines, a pentel water colour brush pen filled with Pebeo ink, trusty, trusty white out and a line tool - this one can adjust its width for very fine to very fat lines, just be sure your straight edge is raised off the page otherwise ink will seep under and make a ink go all over the place.

On this page though, I only used the brush for filling in blacks and a few fine lines.

A Panel

A panel from a little project I'm working on.

Oz Comic Challenge Ironman

Here's an image I did for theOz Comic weekly challenge but didn't get to sending off - a little unfinished perhaps. I was inspired by Moebius' painting of Ironman and Simon Bisley's ABC warriors.

I sketched it up in pencil and coloured it in with the kids' textas.

I then scanned it into photoshop, cleaned it up a bit and added the black.

The original now sits on my daughter's wall next to her bed and keeps the monsters away.

Comic Creator of the Month

Check out this link for a little interview with me over at the ASA website.

Killeroo Submission Process

Killeroo creator Darren Close recently announced a new 120pp Killeroo comic and has been looking for submissions from artists and writers. I was fortunate enough to have my submission accepted. Here is the process I went through to create the submission page.


Here are the rough page layouts that I came up with. I was happy with the angles and general images in the first attempt but not the placement or frame sizes so I redrew the frames not bothering with the sketches.

Next I framed up my final on a piece of bristol and roughly sketched in the panels before inking the panel borders to make sure everything fitted like I wanted. Notice the seam in the middle - I have an A4 scanner and consequently have to stitch every page I do together. With these pencils the seam is noticeable because I couldn't be bothered fiddling around for an hour when the overall effect comes across just fine.

Happy with that I drew up the final pencils

You may notice a few extra elements added in these preliminary inks. I never know what the final page needs until I get some ink on. I find creating a page a very organic process and never do 'finished' pencils. It involves so much rubbing out, increases the amount of time I spend on a page but mostly because I hate tracing. Tracing makes images stiff and lifeless. Slapping on ink gives me so much more flexibility and movement, sure sometimes a little bit of white out is necessary but the end result is so much better.

Then the final inks. I've blown up the 3rd panel in photoshop as I felt it was too small and cleaned all the smudges my scanner leaves. I also changed the expression on Jock's face in the last panel as he looked like he was smiling. And voila!

PS motorcylces are a bugger to draw!

Alien!

My Oz Comic Challenge entry: an xenomorph.

I wish I'd done more production scans but oh well. Here's the couple I did.