Forbidden Planet cancertown signing

Mark it in your diaries:

Saturday 30th May

2PM - 4PM

Forbidden Planet Belfast

(Ann street, just off Corn Market)

It's not only an artist/graphic novel signing with your's truly, but it also marks the Irish/N.Irish launch of Cancertown.

If my handsome face wasn't enough to get you down, the kind folks at FP Belfast are doing a special launch price of £12.99 during signing hours (£14.99 normally) and there'll be a unique sketch card with every copy bought. Thats right, you get a little piece of original art and the 'sold-out-every-day-on-Amazon' first print of Cancertown: An Inconvenient Tooth, for less than the normal RRP of the book alone! How could you refuse?

Ok, enough hyberbole, my Stan Lee voice is safely back in its box, but if anyone is around Belfast on the day come along and say hi, and it is a pretty good deal if you want a copy of Cancertown.

Onwards to the art... Aimee was digging through boxes today (looking for her medical card), which we havn't bothered to unpack since we moved, and threw me a little sketch pad. Inside were some of the early layouts I'd done for Cancertown (before I had a notion of organising projects) so I thought I'd throw them up on the blog for all to see, along with the pencilled and finished pages:

I ended up staying pretty tight to the layout on the left (ch.2 pg.9) but decided to redo the second layout (ch.2 pg.10) again. I think this was probably because the story flow was too odd (The action in panel 2 was happening both to the right and below panel 1 simulationously) so I rejigged it as the layout below.

The numbers and sizes scribbled at the top right is something I sometimes do when I'm trying to set the pace/mood. They refer to the panel number and comparitive size of the panels on the page. I jot them down as I read the script so I can arrange the panels according when I layout the page properly. This particular set either refers to a different page or were just completely ignored/changed for this one.

Here are the finished pages with my contribution in b/w, next to the finished versions with Mel's colours and Nics Letters added in (with, of course, Cy's words in the captions):

You'll see that I almost always sketch in little word balloons just to make sure I've left some room. They're nowhere near exact, and Nic's flow is much better than mine but it saves me from accidently zooming right in with a close up and leaving no room for dialouge at all. I don't send these layouts on to the rest of the crew, and now that I see them against the final pages it's strange and cool how some of them match up really close to Nic's even though she hadn't even seen my layouts. The second page in particular is a good example.

I've said this before, but Team Cancertown is definetly becoming some sort of symbiotic creature :P

Next Blog: It'll probably either be some sketches from the recent 'life drawing cabaret' or the many variations/redraws of a Slaughtermans Creed panel, so check back on wednesday.

I gots some compliments

"the visceral, hallucinogenic art of Stephen Downey working in tandem with the hard-bitten script"


Thats what the legendary Bryan Tablot wrote about my contribution to Cancertown: An inconvenient Tooth. He wrote a very complimentary foreword for the graphic novel, but since I'm selfish and promotarious* I've only cut and pasted the sentence about me.

You can however read the whole thing over at Cancertown writer Cy's Dethan's blog or indeed Insomnia Publications Blog where the contributions of all Team Cancertown get their mention and there are also details on how you can get your hands on the trade for cheap.




If you're too lazy to do that, you can always pre-order straight from Amazon!




*Yes I did make that word up . Its an adjective describing one who is 'self-promoting'. Its not neccessarily a negative trait, but a too much of it can be bloody annoying!

Blooood...

Here's that piece I was talking about.

Cy Dethan's written a pretty gory and disturbing script for this project (and I mean that in the best possible way) so I've tried to match that in this little concept piece.

I'm stepping up and handling full art chores on Slaughterman's Creed and I had fun creating some 'blood splatter' and 'chain link' brushes in photoshop.

Its my first time doing full colours on a project this size so here's hoping I won't have a nervous breakdown somewhere in the middle. Hopefully you won't really notice, but I've gone straight from pencil for the image above and darkened it in photoshop (apart from the hooks which I drew with the 'pen' tool in photoshop). I tend to draw pretty tightly, so hopefully skipping the inks will make up some of the colouring time. I'll give it a few pages and see how it works out, if I don't like it I'll be whipping out the brushes :)