Busy

Late blog this week as it's been a busy one. Between my Mum's birthday, Aimee's Mum's birthday, and going away for a midweek break for Aimee's Birthday (which is technically this coming Tuesday, but we went away early as she's back to class tomorrow) I've hardly had time for drawing.

It was nice to catch up on some reading though and (finally) finished Good Omens, caught up on Vol 10. of The Walking Dead, and read Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained! as well as this the last few weeks comics while sitting by the fire at the KillyHevlin hotel drinking some Irish Coffees.

Here's an unused sketch of Mr. Green from the upcoming Slaughterman's Creed. I was looking for a different style that would indicate Green wasn't quite there (this would have been made semi-transparent and layered over the background panel in Photoshop) but this version ended up looking far too muddled on the page, and the colours, as Cy rightly pointed out, made Green look Jamaican. This was done with some Winsor & Newton coloured Inks that I'd just bought for a separate commission and wanted to try out.

I really liked working with the inks on this and the commission, so I'll be finding something else to do with them. Don't think a full comic project would be feasible though as they take quite a lot of work.

(Not the) Master of puppets

I sometimes draw things that aren't comicbook related. Last year I was emailed out of the blue by a local TV production company asking me if I thought my style could be tailored to designing some puppets for their show. I sent off a couple of quick sketches based on the descriptions they sent, but I presume it wasn't what they were looking for as it didn't go any further.

So anyway, I found the sketches as I was cleaning up my laptop and thought I'd post them up here.

I have a few other non comics art projects on my hard drive, and I'm about to start another, so I might post some of that soon.

Eggheads

Back from Glasgow this morning after my second consecutive 5:30am wakeup. Feeling a bit groggy but fine fun was had by the League of Just Us while battling the Eggheads.

Five comic book creators. Stephen (otherwise known as Reggie), Paddy, Aidan, me and PJ.

Four comicbok creators and a girl (Aimee, and ok, she's a comicbook model).

A few of us wearing some dodgy shirts. Bright colours were compulsory and I had to go shopping..

The League of Just Us and the Eggheads.

The show won't air until Summer some time and you'll have to wait until then to find out whether we won. I can say that the staff at BBC Scotland were very nice, as were the Eggheads themselves. We also had a special gift for Jeremy Vine, the presenter, which I'll post after it makes its TV debut. 

Desaturation

Well last year I had the bright idea of trying to pencil, ink and colour all 5 chapters of Slaughterman's Creed. It was a great learning experience and while I found the colouring often very frustrating as I learnt how to do it, I'm quite happy with how a lot of it turned out.
Lately I've come to enjoy being able to refine faces and features without having to draw in the black ink lines that can often feel restrictive, and colouring my own work allowed me to tailor the line work to allow for this.

That said, I have two chapters of the book completely coloured, but from the third (of five) I'm going to reduce my art chores to just pencilling. The current process was just too time consuming and if we want Slaughterman's Creed out this year something had to give. There is a natural story transition before chapter 3 that will hopefully be complimented by a change in colour artist, so hopefully any stylistic change will enhance the reading experience and not detract from it.

It will certainly be exciting and interesting to see how another colourist interprets my work again...