Draw Harvey!

On hearing the sad news of Harvey Pekar's passing, Adam Cadwell had the great idea of starting a Flickr group called 'Draw Harvey!' and this is my contribution. Go take a look at all the other Harveys on there, it's fascinating to see how one man can inspire so many different interpretations.

Bob Fish and Le Jeune Albert

I did this for the Forbidden Planet International blog who are celebrating Bastille Day today. I wasn't the only contributor, I was in mighty fine company alongside Garen Ewing, Geraint Ford, Rob Jackson and Rob Davis. I love the work of Yves Chaland and thought it'd be fun to draw his private detective character, Bob Fish and his assistant Le Jeune Albert.

 I'd done a couple of very rough thumbnail sketches and combined two that I thought looked okay. Then I worked that thumbnail up to this scribbly rough.

For the next stage I took this into Manga Studio and tidied it up a little and filled in the buildings and background a little more.

The next step was to print it out on to some bristol board in light blue and do some tighter pencil work.

Then I inked the characters and foreground with a brush, here's a pic of the page partially inked.

At this stage I was getting pushed for time and I thought it would be quicker to do the background buildings and bits and pieces in Manga Studio so I scanned what I'd done so far and finished off the inking took it into Photoshop and coloured it up. Here's the final line art.

I'd like to have spent some more time on the backgrounds and tweaked a few things but there's always something you'd like to do different and I think it turned out pretty well in the end.

Absinthe Frappé

The character of Absinthe Frappé came about through a Twitter conversation between Simon Gane, Jamie Smart, Jonathan Edwards, Rob Davis and myself. For a slightly more detailed explanation of the conversation and Jonathan's fab illustration of Absinthe click here. We all decided the name was perfect for a Jonathan Edwards' character but I just had to have a go too.