Birdman Doodle

While rooting through my pages of art on Dead Pets I found this doodle on the back of one of the pages. I have a terrible tendency to faff about doodling or making marks in the margins and on the back of the work I'm actually meant to be doing. A two-headed birdman, don't know what I was up to there, I have an inkling that I may have had a Huzzah in the back of my mind at the time. Pardon me for not cleaning up the scan but I've got some work to get on with and posting this is just another way of doodling in the margins.

Dead Pets Pencils - Page 3

Here's the next page of pencils along with the inks, pencils are a lot rougher than the first two, I think I was winging it a bit with this one, there might have been a more tightly penciled version but if there is I can't find it. I don't why I drew Godfrey the dog in front of the cross on panel 3, it's messy.

 

You can see in the inked version I got rid of him for clarity's sake. The last panel changed a bit, I was never truly happy with the drawing of Sam, the boy, in that panel. I was right not to be happy, the final version of him scarpering is better, at least I think it is, but it still bothers me. I turned Frazzle, the cat, so that he has his back to us, and decided to have all the characters in silhouette, it probably made more sense to have them looking at Sam and made his running away a focal point.

Dead Pets Pencils - Page 2

I've been neglecting my blog again, partly through laziness but I've also been busy working on some comic strips for educational books with Rob Davis and Geraint Ford. I'll post some bits and pieces from that soon but seeing as I've got a bunch of pencils from Dead Pets Society sitting around I'd scan them in and post them here, my plan is that it'll give me something a bit more regular to update the blog with while I work on these strips with Rob and Ger. 

Here's the pencils for page 2 of DPS (I posted page 1 quite a while back). I was probably trying to be tight with the pencils at this stage, I was still finding my way with everything at this point. If memory serves, I left more to the inking stage as time went by and I became more comfortable drawing the characters. Dead Pets was inked with the Kuretake brushpen that I like so much. I did fix a lot of mistakes, clean up the artwork and fill in areas of black on the computer once the art was scanned in though, that tends to be a quicker, easier process. I would usually blow up my thumbnails and print them off in light blue and pencil over those, I think I did that here but there's a lot of blue lines so I can't really make out what's what.

 

If you'd like to read a couple of full episodes in colour then a previous post has a couple of links to them on the Guardian site.

Draw Serge!

Lovely man and top illustrator, Jonathan Edwards has set up a blog called 'Draw Serge!', so I did.




I think he came out looking more like Johnny Cash than Serge, oh well. I grabbed a few pics from the internet for reference, one of them had him standing atop a church or cathedral with a gargoyle or two behind him which seemed so appropriate that I nicked the idea. That's a 500 franc note he's lighting his cigarette with, he famously burned one on a TV show as some sort of protest against high taxation. Whilst looking for pics I found he had a much-loved dog called 'Nana' who looked so lovely I had to include her as well.

Do visit the Draw Serge! site and check out all the other fine contributions from the likes of fellow Huzzah contributor, Rob Davis, the wonderful Simon Gane and many others. And, if you're an artist, why not jump in and contribute a Serge!

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!!

The DFC - Comes To An End

As you may have noticed, the subscription button to the DFC website has been removed from the blog, the sad news is that the comic will end at issue 43. The current financial situation hits everybody, even big publishers like Random House. I'm sad but not completely surprised, it's always a big risk trying something new and different, and starting up a new children's comic in the UK is not an easy path especially if you avoid the shiny plastic toy with free comic TV tie-in mentality that is all pervasive in children's comics these days.

I'm sad that the Dead Pets won't get to appear in the comic itself, I was looking forward to being in there along with all my fellow DFC buddies. On the positive side, I was lucky enough to get to write and draw my own twenty-four page comic strip, have it published in the Guardian and get paid for it! I'm very lucky to have had that opportunity.

I think that everybody involved should be proud to have put out a weekly comic, with no ads and all original material for the best part of a year. Anybody that's ever been involved with something like that will know how much work it involves and how difficult it is to do. There's a lot of juggling and planning and dealing with artistic temperaments involved for the editorial team. I'd like to thank David Fickling for making it happen, Ben Sharpe, my editor, who was been an absolute joy to work with, he was incredibly patient and helpful even when I'm sure I pushed him to hair-pulling frustration at times. I don't know if he's aware of this but he is known as 'Lovely Ben' to me and many others. Thanks to Will Fickling and all the other people in the office that worked so hard on making the DFC what it was.