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.

Good Dog, Bad Dog

Just a quick post to plug Dave Shelton's wonderful Good Dog, Bad Dog book. It's the first of the DFC Library books to go on sale. Detective dogs in a film noir world with plenty of humour and milkshakes, what more could anybody ask for? I had a blast colouring one of the stories, The Golden Bone, and I'm overjoyed to see all the strips collected in one beautiful book. Go see Dave's blog for more info, updates and links to (very positive) reviews. Not to mention many of his delightful sketches and doodles.

Dead Pets Pencils - Episode 2, Page 2

It's been about a year since Dead Pets was printed in the Guardian's now sadly defunct Comic section, it doesn't feel anything like that amount of time. It's always interesting, and slightly alarming, to take a look back over work that was drawn a while ago, more often than not all you can see are the dodgy bits of drawing and where you would do things differently. The thing that strikes me most about this page right now is that there's fourteen panels on it. Fourteen panels?! What was I thinking? Artist me punches writer me in the gut. Good thing my gut is generously cushioned.

I'm not fat, my chest has slipped.

One thing I wanted to make sure of with Dead Pets was that there was always something happening in every episode, that the story was always progressing and that it took a little bit of time to read even though there was only 3 pages every week, one of which wasn't a full page. I also wanted to take advantage of the weekly format and the opportunity to have some sort of cliffhanger or unresolved moment at the close of every episode, hoping the readers would want to come back the following week. I don't know if I was successful in achieving any of those things but that's how I hoped it would be.

Here's the inks for this page. I cheated a little and used a very slightly modified copy of panel seven for panel 3 once it was all scanned in.

Huzzah!! Noir

Exciting news! Huzzah!! Noir has gone live, Ian Culbard has started it off with a lovely page...and so, another adventure begins. Click the logo to go see.


Don't worry, Huzzah Noir!! does not mean the end of regular Huzzah!!, they're running in tandem. Have a gander at the latest contributions from Rob Davis, Colin Fawcett and Paul Harrison-Davies, they're a treat!

Huzzah and the Big Baby of Death.

I made my third contribution to Huzzah!! recently. After what Rob had the Baron say in this panel, I wondered what could possibly 'kill death itself'. I thought it may be that the sibling infant was the opposite of death and if it came into contact with the big baby 'o' death (BBOD) something interesting might happen. Having the BBOD ingest its sibling meant I could get a joke out of it and refer back to when the Baron rescued the infant from Xog. It also was an excuse for me to have a go at drawing beams of light shooting out of an evil child.

Hmmm, reading that last paragraph back to myself only confirms my suspicions that talking about Huzzah!! and what's happening in it makes you sound like a gibbering loony.

I've been slowly building up to doing the maximum allowed of 3 tiers per page, per Huzzah!! so this is the first whole page I've drawn although it's actually spread out over two pages as the first panel is the last panel of page 26. Here's the roughs I knocked up in Manga Studio. Everything was done in Manga Studio this time around. Occasionally, I might use a bit of Photoshop as well but there wasn't a whole lot of colouring to do seeing as there's so much solid black. I fancied the idea that the BBOD had been given some toys to play with and the fact that he'd just learned to speak meant alphabet building blocks, of course!





























I went with the fairly rough pencils and decided I'd wing it a bit. Not sure if that was a good idea as I wasn't very confident throughout the making of this page, it took ages to finish, much longer than I expected and I was late in posting it. Lots of black with almost no backgrounds would lead you to think there'd be less drawing involved, that it'd be easier to get done, but it didn't work out that way for me with this page.

Next, the final art, put together as a whole page, that's how I drew it and worked on it but to see it in context, visit Huzzah!!

HUZZAH!!

It's deadline crunch time so I've been quiet for a little while and probably will remain so until the end of the month.

I've just popped my head out to urge you to visit HUZZAH!!, the successor to Who Killed Round Robin? I've been invited to take part and I'm excited (and not to mention a little daunted) by the whole thing. I won't go into what it's all about here as it's explained on the site. I haven't been able to contribute yet but will do once Dead Pets is done and dusted, around the beginning of Feb. Go see the lovely, unfolding comic strip being created by my fellow participants.

I've just realised that this is my first post of 2009, so let me wish you a belated Happy New Year!

Step right up! For one week only, folks...

...the DFC will be in Tescos throughout the land from Wed 26th Nov to Tues 2nd Dec. They're making it available for the one week only as a marketing exercise. Here's a pic of the cover, featuring a Mo-Bot from Neill Cameron's Mo-Bot High...





This is an opportunity to take a look at this subscription only, weekly children's comic without having to commit to a subscription. There's a great variety of comic strips in the DFC and I think it's worth investigating and supporting. It's all original material, nothing licensed, nothing based on already existing cartoons, toys or brands and its mixture of silliness, adventure and fun is a refreshing change from most of what's out there already. I should mention that I've had some involvement with the DFC, I coloured the first Good Dog, Bad Dog, strip by my good and hugely talented friend, Dave Shelton and I continue to be involved but I don't think I can say much about that just yet.

As much as I might like to.