HB pencil and Pilot DR Lettering Pens sizes 10 and 20 on Daler-Rowney Bristol Board. Drawn on both sides in this age of austerity.
I used to draw everything on Schoellershammer two-sheet Bristol Board but just about the time I started to draw Slaine you couldn’t get in anymore, which is why Slaine was drawn on Arches Aquarelle 140lb Hot Pressed Watercolour Paper.
It is an inviolable law of nature that whenever I come to break down a story into page layouts there shall be at least one page, and usually more than one, that will be a real bugger to figure out. It matters not if I am working with a full script, where the writer has defined the pages and panels, or, as in this case, a plot outline with dialogue, where the artist defines the pages and panels.
And I can always tell which pages they’ll be from even the most cursory reading of the script, so that throughout the layout process they lurk just out of sight, malevolent entities waiting to destroy me.
My first defence against them is to just press on with the thumbnails and pretend that the problem doesn’t exist – I’ll just bodge something, and tell myself it’ll be okay – but in my heart I know I won’t be able to leave it alone.
The next stage after the thumbnails is to rule up the panels on the artwork, and it is at this point that I have to make a decision about the badness – do I carry on regardless or do I start ‘fixing’, always a dangerous thing to do. Sometimes I manage to shrug and let it go, but usually I have to scratch that itch.
And so it was with this exposition heavy three page sequence:
I’ve nothing against talking heads, but you must draw the line somewhere, and the three miscreants below are well over it. Not only are they doing a disservice to the script, they are also breaking several of my own arbitrary rules, for example the third panel on the first page being followed by three panels in a split tier – appalling. On the second page you can’t see anybody’s feet – shameful. Plus all three are lacking a sense of place – criminal.
Took me hours to figure out how to fix these pages, you can see from the following three scans how cockled the paper has become from the endless erasing. The doodling is a bad sign as well, some instant gratification to counter the frustration.
Finally, at lethal last, some layouts I can live with. There’s no higgledy piggledy panels, there’s feet, and each page now has a panel large enough to give a good idea of the location.
Me and Dave Gibbons shared a studio for a while. Having watched me at work, he noted that ‘a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of tiny minds.’ If only I’d listened…
I’ve finally started drawing the Kestrels book. Because we have no publisher as yet, I’m hoping to keep up some sort of income stream by drawing the odd commission here and there. Here’s the pencils for the first one.
Always been a bit nervous about cross hatching but thought it was about time I had a go. Works okay I think.
Well, the only time there was an end product, that is. This is the postcard mentioned in the Three Legged Wasp post, and was my contribution to the twenty four postcard set ‘Outbreaks of Violets’.
There was another attempted collaboration when me, Alan, and Kevin O’Neill submitted a proposal to an American publisher that was rejected because it was ‘too good’.
I did draw a cover for 2000AD based on one of Mister Moore’s Future Shock stories, but I’m not sure if that counts as working together seeing as how I’d not read the script.
I still like most of my Tank Girl art as much as when I made it, contrary to the more usual ambivalence I have about my own work. I doubt that I shall ever use this method again for a comic book, a more long-winded farrago it would be hard to imagine.
The pencils were drawn on an A4 printout of the thumbnail. As each panel was drawn it would be scanned and then as like as not destroyed by the pencils for the next panel, and so on. The pencilled panel files would be cleaned up and assembled on a 600dpi master file. When this was ready the colouring would be done at 300dpi and the colour file would then be dropped onto the original 600dpi linework.
I did one hundred and thirty two pages using this process. At some point I should have had my head examined…
Last weekend we got back from another lovely week on the Isle of Skye and, as always if I have a break from drawing, it’s taken me an equivalent period to get my hand working properly again. Any longer than a week and even how to hold a pencil becomes a learning experience.
Here’s a sheet of sketches I’ve done this morning using my trusty HB pencil on copy paper, back in the groove. I hope.
I came across this folder of character designs for the aforementioned Rock Revolution and couldn’t decide which pics to post, so here are all of them.
