Slaughterman's Creed FP Belfast Signing

To celebrate the launch of Slaughterman's Creed I'll be signing copies at Forbidden Planet Belfast on the 11th of June. Slaughterman's Creed inker Andy Brown and cover painter Ryan Brown will be there also.

If you come along there's a free sketch with every copy bought on the day and Andy Luke will be signing and giving out FREE print copies of our Absence comic.

Hopefully see a few of you there and spread the word if you can.

Slaughterman's Creed: Video Nasties

I got my hands on a few copies of Slaughterman's Creed on the Sunday of last weekend's Bristol Comic Expo, and it's so good to see another year of work held in my hand.

I was suprised that the pages, and Vicky's colours especially, look even better in print than they do on screen. Mr. Green's tattoo's stand out fantasticly well on the glossy paper.

A real life Green: Scott Grandison, who was crazy enough to get his face painted as Mr. Green to host our panel: The Task of Blood: Creating Slaugherman's Creed.

A photo from the panel itself, which went down really well with a healthy audience listening in. You can download the audio, posted under Scott's podcast 'Comicbook Outsiders', here, and if you want to see the presentation slides you can download a PDF here.

I spoke a little about uising reference and models, which included a short 'reference to final pencils' video which you can watch below.

The whole Bristol weekend was a fantastic launch for the book, with lots of people coming by to pick up a long list of pre-orders. Together with sales on the day we shifted over 100 copies which is by far Markosia's highest ever selling convention book.

Next up is the 2D festival in Derry where I'll be on the Creator owned/Piracy panel on Friday 3rd June at 8:30pm, then selling Slaughterman's Creed and sketching at the Comic's open day on the Saturday.

Hopefully see a few of you there.



Ps. Thanks for the photos Vicky

Big Blog: Slaughterman's Creed Bristol Panel, Order Cancertown, Jennifer Wilde, Kapow! etc.

Lots and lots happening recently so it's time for a big blog roundup!

Slaughterman's Creed panel at Bristol: I'm really excited that I'll be part of The Task of Blood: Creating Slaughterman's Creed panel at the Bristol Small Press Expo. It will be held at 12pm on Sunday 15th May at the Mercure Hotel and will be hosted by Scott Grandison of Comic Book Outsiders. It'll bascially be Cy, Vicky, Nic and myself chatting about making the book, showing some work in progress and I hear there may also be some Mr. Green facepainting and sweet. If you're a Facebook-er you can keep up to date on the events page.

Kapow! Con: I'll be attending the Kapow! Comic con this coming weekend 9th - 10th of April. I'll be at table 87 ("in the island beneath the Tardis and Darlek."). I'll be drawing custom £10 sketches and selling the prints that  you can see in the Shop section. I'll also have previews of Slaughterman's Creed, Jennifer Wilde and other stuff on display so if you're attending drop by for a chat. 


FanSciCon: Just a week later on the 15th April I'll be a guest at the free, one day FanSciCon in Dublin. It will be held at UCD Students Centre in Dunlin from 9am and promises to be good fun. It's in association with Rob Curley's Sub City so I'm sure we'll be showing off some Jennifer Wilde Stuff. Speaking off...


Jennifer Wilde: The Facebook group for my latest project Jennifer Wilde from Atomic Diner has just started up its Facebook page. If I haven't mention before it's written by Rob Curley and Maura McHugh with art by me. There's little a Preview of the #1 cover over there, which I'll post in a bigger format here once I get the logo added.  


Order Cancertown and Slaughterman's Creed: We had a little trouble with Amazon, but you can now pre-order both Slaughterman's Creed and the Cancertown re-release through both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. If you prefer to shop in a comic store, Cancertown is on Pg 218 of the latest Previews catalogue for shipping in June and available to order in-store now. Slaughterman's Creed was in last month's catalogue, but Forbidden Planet Belfast have ordered a few copies and are taking reservations for them at the minute. 


Digital Revolution: If you prefer to read your comics digitally on your iPad, laptop or even phone you can download all of Cancertown via Graphic.ly for under $6 here. I wish I had a tablet to see how it looked. 


Phew! All this stuff going on and I still have to get the actual art done.

Slaughterman's Creed advance reviews!

We've been hearing word back from advance copies of Slaughterman's Creed we've sent out and one of the most exciting came from Punisher artist Laurence Campbell who has written the foreword to the book. You can read the whole foreword on Cy's Blog but here's a brief excerpt:

"It’s Stephen Downey, the artist, who I feel so sorry for. This may be because, being an artist myself, I know what he’s going through. You see, people are going to readSlaughterman’s Creed and will be going to the artist saying, “How do you come up with this dark stuff? What goes on in that scary mind of yours?”

And Stephen Downey will say, “It’s not my fault - it’s the writer, Cy Dethan. He put it in the script." 

Advance reviews have been popping up on the internet and here are a few snippets and links to what people have said:

Geek Syndicate:


"The story is a violent one and art matches it but I never found the violence to be over the top. It felt real, visceral and horrible, as true depictions of violence should be. The second thing is this book is for adults in both the aforementioned violence but also in the plot, the themes and the characterisation. "

Hi-Ex blog:

So, all in all, I’d say this book is a bit of a triumph for all involved. With a strong narrative, well realised and rounded characters, strong visuals and a wonderful seam of oh so black humour this deserves to be a hit for all involved. And not turning it into a movie would be nothing short of a travesty.


Everything Comes Back to 2000AD blog: 


I was a big fan of Stephen’s Cancertown art but the improvement between this and that is marked and has me excited to see how his next project looks. Cy’s writing is very tight and the book has a real British cinema feel to it.


There are great reviews on the Small Press Big Mouth and the Sci-Fi pulse podcasts. 


With so many words in this post, I thought I should share another panel from the book:

Slaughterman's Creed is Open for Orders!

Slaughterman's Creed is now available for pre-order, to be either delivered by post or picked up at the launch in May at the Bristol Comic Expo! This was a huge project for me, with 110 pages that I either pencilled or fully inked and coloured. It's a great, complete story by Cy Dethan who's blog I'm going to quote ordering details from because I'm too lazy to reword:

"Things are ramping up towards the launch by Markosia comics of the hardcopy edition of Slaughterman's Creed at Bristol Comics Convention in Mid May.

There is going to be a convention special edition, signed by all the creators, on sale over the launch weekend at the special price of £10.

Everyone who buys it on the day, or pre-orders it before the 14th May to be sent out after the show will be entered into a competition to win an original piece of art pencilled by Stephen Downey and coloured by Vicky Stonebridge.

We know that not everyone will be physically going to the con, and some people will only be there for one or other of the days, so if you would like to reserve a copy to be held behind the stand, or posted out to you, please then you need to get in touch with us now and we will add your name to the list, and email you to let you know the options for how to pay.

If you are not coming to the show there will be postage added to the £10 which is £2 in the UK and £4 for overseas delivery."

So there you go. You can always get in touch with me about pre-ordering a copy instead if it's easier for you.


Here's a gory little panel, with colours by Vicky Stonebridge and inks by Andy Brown to whet your appetites:

Slaughterman's Coming, Cancertown's Back!

It's been a great few days for my creator-owned projects.

From yesterday all 6 chapters of Cancertown: An Inconvenient Tooth are back on the Playstation network as a digital comic, published through Markosia and complete with audio commentary from Cy Dethan and I. Well, Cy does most of the talking, clocking in a couple of hours of facinating insights spread over the chapters, while I chip in with a few art process snippets. The first chapter is free, so if you have a PSP why not check it out. Markosia have also announced that Cancertown will be coming back into print sometime later in 2011.

Look at that beautiful cover! Harry Markos at Markosia has also let us announce that Slaughterman's Creed will launch at Bristol International Comic Expo! Above is the all-but-finished graphic novel cover (pencils by myself with digital paints from Ryan Brown). Cancertown went down a storm 2 years ago at it's Bristol launch so we're hoping things will go as well for Slaughterman's Creed. It'll also be in stores some time after that. Must book some flights now...

It's in the (body) bag!

The final interior inks, colours and letters (by the talented Vicky Stonebridge, Andy Brown and Nic Wilkinson respectively) have been added to the last page of Slaughterman's Creed and the book is done!

Cy Dethan has added a 12 page lettered preview to his website (and to our Facebook group which you may care to join) so you can finally add a little bit of context to those random panels and works-in-progress I'd been posting early last year. 

It's a little odd seeing artwork that I drew over a year and a half ago only surfacing now, (I finished the interiors of the book about 6 months ago, but it's 110 pages long and the panels below were drawn sometime just before the launch of Cancertown at Bristol '09) but I'm proud of the book and you're in for a gory treat with Cy's cracker story.

Here's the first two pages of the graphic novel (I handled full art duties for the first two chapters, so this one's all me with Nic's lettering and of course Cy's words), but head on over to Cy's site for the rest of the preview:

The story will be released on the PSP as a digital comic through Markosia later in 2011 and other formats will follow. I'll update the blog with all the info as I get it.

Cover Story

You may have seen one of the Work-in-Progress Slaughterman's Creed cover's slip out on the net this weekend while I was prancing around the MCMexpo. I finally have the chance to share the cover here along with the slightly unusual process behind it.

I had worked on another cover before with Ryan Brown and after seeing his digitally painted work over Simon Bisley's 13 coins comic pages, asked him if he would paint over my pencils/layout for the Slaughterman's Creed covers (Ryan's brother Andy is the co-founder of Beserker Comics, and inked the interior latter chapters of SC).

I had a rough idea for the cover and sketched out a quick layout (which I can't find at the minute, but I'll have found it by the time the cover is finished and post it then), set up my studio lights and took a few reference photos. Here's the one for Sidney himself:

Using the reference photos I sketched out the graphic novel cover layout below.

At this point (as those who were following my blog last year will know), I had planned to spend my Summer in Canada and continue drawing. Things fell through at the last minute and although we had a brilliant month in Belize instead, we did a lot more traveling and A3 scanners are few and far between. 

Each digital chapter will feature an individual characters so I had to draw each one separately and Ryan agreed to paint and compose them together for the GN. I had to wait to get to Seattle four weeks later to print out five blue lines copies of the sketch and pencil out the individual characters over it. Since Sidney was already in the foreground he needed the least done, but I did tidy him up a little. 

By the time I'd finished drawing the characters we were on a plane to Las Vegas. I thought it would be easy to find a scanner there, but all I could find was slot machines and wedding chapels. I was sending my laptop back home the next day, so all I could do was take photos of the pencils on my camera (see above), load them into my dropbox, along with the original reference photos and some interior character shots and upload via the hotel wireless. 

Yip, that WIP cover painting was actually painted over a photo sent from Las Vegas. I reckon Ryan did a bloody awesome job! 

Expect another update, with more sketches and ref material when the cover is finished. 

Done!

I wrapped up the bulk of my work for Slaughterman's Creed last week. That's another book, another pile of pages, and another year down.

All together for the project I pencilled 110 pages, 46 of which I inked and coloured 44, as well as the usual redraws and recolours of course.

Bringing on Andy Brown as inker and Vicky Stonebridge as colourist from ch. 3 onwards has been a godsend, as I fear I'd still be halfway there without them, and of course the book looks all the better for having them on board. Nic Wilkinson is sending me a PDF of the lettered book so far tonight and I cant wait to see what she's done with it. Cy Dethan is hoping to print out a copy to preview around at Bristol, so if anyone is heading over, you should be able to check out a good chunk of the book in progress.

I've still a couple of covers to do for the series, but the story is completely told and for the most part my job is done. Should have more details on a release schedule after Bristol, so keep your eyes on the blog.

Here's a little sketch of the slaughterman himself, I doodled post completion of the project.

Facing the end..

Been doing a lot of work on Slaughterman's Creed these past few weeks, but unfortunately as we get into the last chapters the pages, and even most panels, are all getting a little spoilery so I can't really post much here.

Speaking of Slaughterman's Creed, Ollie Masters, who gracefully posed for a couple of  Mr. Green reference shots at Bristol comic con last year, has his short story that he contributed to Bob Heske's 2012: A Final Prayer GN on show over at Wowio. The story acts as a preview for the GN (which features 8 pages of art from yours truely) that's now available to download at the Heske Horror Wowio page.

Panel progression. Loose pencils, tighter pencils, then grayscale rendering for panel featured in 2012: Final Prayer GN

I've booked tickets and flights again for this year's Bristol comic con, or rather the Bristol International Comic & small press expo to give it its full name, so I'll be hanging around the hall with my portfolio on May 22nd and 23rd. We'll also have a signing session for Cancertown which I should have times confirmed for soon.

Carving it out...

UPDATE: Added Andy's inks for this page.

Over own his blog, Cy Dethan is showing off some of my favourite new pencilled pages from the later chapters of Slaughterman's Creed, including this one below for which I've shown the layout, blue line, then pencils:

I've started using blue line again as I find its helpful at differentiating between my scribbles and the tighter pencils, so Andy Brown, who's inks can be seen above, should have an easier time at it.

Twump!

Just a little Twitter dump of the images I've tweeted in the last few weeks and haven't been posted here. All work in progress (apart from the last one which will always remain just a scribble):

Ever wanted to know the weekly schedule of a comicbook artist and part time musician/tutor? Not really? In the hope that someone will find it of interest...

Monday 9am - 5:30pm - Drawing in my studio with half hour break at around 11:30 and an hour or so at around 2:30 for lunch. At 5:30 I have dinner with Aimee who's just returned from her hospital duties (she's a medial student), then leave the house at 6:20 to teach in Carryduff, then drive straight to gig in Lavery's. Sometimes I get time for coffee and a comic in Clements in between, depending on how quick I get away from the classes. Arrive home for bed about 1:30am. Took me a few weeks to get my coffee level right. One cup at about 10pm stops me being too tired to drive home, any more or later and I won't sleep.

Tuesday Until recently this was almost exactly the same as Monday, but from last week I had to drop the Tues class I teach, which should give me some extra time in the house between 5pm and 7:30pm

Wednesday 9am - 5:30 pm - Drawing in the studio, same breaks as Monday (and every other week day). At around 5:30pm have dinner with Aimee then leave the house about 6.20pm again to teach in Carryduff. Get back home around half 9 and spend some quality Aimee-Time. Blog.

Thursday - Same as Wednesday but get home around 9pm (unless its the 1st Thursday of the month when I'll head to Comicbook creators meeting in Garrick, so get home about 12:30am)

Friday - 9 to 5 drawing, then order Chinese and usually indulge in some alcohol drinking. Frequently there is some sort of Mario Kart Wii or DVD boxset involved with Aimee.

Saturday - Lazy breakfast. Teach class 11:30am - 1pm. Up until last week I took a fortnightly kids session until about 3:30, but I've had to drop that too. Spend an hour or two in town buying comics and other window shopping with Aimee (she likes shiny things and Jane Norman)

Sunday - More often than not there is some commitment for Sunday like a family lunch or Christening (like last week), but I try to get a bit of drawing done at some point. Make sure to spend at least a portion of the day relaxing though...

That might read like a bit of a rant, but I enjoy almost everything I do (and love a lot of it). I am tired though... maybe I should go to sleep...

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.

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...

This past week my main task has been finishing off the colours for Slaughterman's Creed chapter 1 (now that the inks are finished for chapter 2).

This is the first major project I've coloured as well as pencilled and inked, so I'm still experimenting with what works. I posted these on Twitter as I was working on the panel but here's some progress work:

I've taken to photographing alleyways lately and the window/speed blur one such photo, taken on my phone, filtered with a motion blur in photoshop:

Still another page to finish tonight, but at least I can colour in bed under the blankets to protect me from the cold winter nights...

Photogenic Fiends

It was a lot easier getting photo reference for Cancertown, considering that Morley was one of the few humans in the story and I could base him on myself. There's a much bigger cast for Slaughterman's Creed, so I had the idea of doing lots and lots of layouts, then having one big photoshoot. I've had two so far, and basically just had a few friends round, with a few drinks, a BBQ and some silly posing.

Here's Andrew Croskery, writer of kronos city with Aidan Largey, who wrote a neat crime story for Insomnia's Layer Zero: Choices anthology, acting out a quick scene and the resulting panels. This is from the first photoshoot, but when I get a chance I'll show a longer video, maybe a whole page worth and the resulting panels.

Its not that I'm atrocious at holding a camera, I was just explaining the next shot to the guys and kept the camera rolling. At least if I ever need a good crotch shot I can always use Andrew as reference.



Looking forward to BICS next weekend and sorting out my portfolio. I'll think I'll be bringing the cover I did for an upcoming project that I'll reveal on wednesday before I head off...

Mr. Green

Mr. Green is another twisted character from the warped mind of Cy Dethan. He's covered head to toe in leaf tatoos to resemble the Mr. Green force of nature from English legend and will be appearing in our upcoming Markosia comic Slaughterman's Creed

Sounded like fun to draw. Here's my initial character design:

I can be a stickler for panel continuity so I wanted to layout Green's tatoos before I got to drawing him in the actual comic pages and keep it as consistent as possible.I drew the above intricate image with the idea of scanning it at a high resolution and simply using photoshop to place it over the inked drawings of Green. I gave it a try once, but the warping/shaping and cutting it took to make it fit from various angles was more effort than it was worth and I ended up losing time.
Since I would be drawing each tatoo by hand, I wanted a simpler but still detailed tatoo layout; both because I would be drawing it over and over again and because I didn't want the face looking too cluttered when rendering the tatoo in ink. The above version has less leaves but, I think, a bolder design overall. Most of the leaves and sections divided into prongs of 3, so it should be easier to draw without having to count how many prongs were on each leaf every time.

I ended up adding more leaves surrounding the face/design, but the main structure is still there on the page. You can see I done something similar with the chest/arms to give the tatoo a consistent focal point and the 'in-between' parts will be filled with leaves. Now that it scanned, and in my Slaughterman's Creed 'tools' folder, I just open the file for reference when drawing Mr. Green.

If anyone is going to BICS next week, I'll be carrying about a few pages of Slaughterman's Creed if you'd like a closer inspection.

Brushing up..

I ordered 4 new inking brush pens last cultpens.com last week. The Kuretake Fudegokochi Brush - Medium, Kuretake Fudegokochi Brush - Fine, Zig BrusH2O Waterbrush Detailer and Tombow ABT Dual Brush Pen Ink - Black (which all together came to just over £10 with free shipping). Now that I've had the chance to try them out I'm going to give my opinion of them.

The following piece, of Lenny Addison from Slaughterman's Creed, was drawn with the first 3 brush pens I mentioned. I didn't use the Tombow, which I'd tried the night before and found the ink to be a little faded with almost a hint of blue-ish to it. It did have the thickest of the 4 brushes (on one end, with a smaller nib or the other side) but it sat out for this particular piece.

The piece below was drawn on plain a4 sketchpad paper (which I'm using to draw most of my comic pages in a3 size these days) but I'll test the pens on bristol board in a follow-up blog.

Pencils: The Gif below is animated just to show my first pencils, then a little correction to the eye, as I noticed it was too high when I first scanned the piece (looks like Lenny has a twitch).

I then used the The Kuretake Fudegokochi Brush - Medium to draw all the outlines and main features. The first thing I noticed was that the width of the brush is less that half that of the Pentel brush Pen I would normally use, The brush itself is firm but flexible, giving it a nice 'bounce'. I found myself inking more than I was going to with this pen as I could get quite a small line as well without having to switch to another tool. The flow of Ink is lovely and a steady movement will result in a very dark line. You won't be able to get a full dry brush effect as the tip is constantly wet, but moving the brush really fast can produce a somewhat rough effect, as seen on the hair above Lenny's ear: As I said, I ended up using the medium brush more than I had planned, but I did add in little details with the Kuretake Fudegokochi Brush - Fine. This needs a firmer pressure to create a decent line (with quick stokes being a little whispy), and my first impression was that the pen was almost reduntant considering the varied width that could be achieved with the medium brush. However since then, while switching between the two, I've noticed the fine pen allows weight to be leaned firmer on the paper/pen and removes the delicate approuch to drawing fine lines that would be needed for the medium brush or a normal paintbrush. The fine brush is closer to a normal pen than the medium, but with the added bonus of being able to alter the line weight, if to a lesser extent than the medium Kuretake.

However, this is when I first noticed the drying time for these brush pens. While erasing the pencil under the ink, the lines I had created with fine brush slightly smudged (it may not be very noticable in the picture below but there is a smudge at the bottom right of the lip and the eyebrow on the left). I think the drying time for the Kuretake Brush pens is somwhere over 30 seconds, but I'll have a proper comparison on my next blog. As I'd menitioned above,, the medium Kuretake is smaller than the Pentel brush pen, so you will still need a larger brush for big blacks. I wouldn't want to fill any blacks more than a sqaure inch or so as it would be both time consuming and waste the pen ink. The big blacks on the jacket, tie and neck were filled in with a normal Winsor & Newton brush and ink. I then went back to the Kuretake Fudegokochi Brush - Medium and added more line weight to the left outline of the face, a few of the features and added a few more details around the collar with the Kuretake Fudegokochi Brush - Fine: The Zig BrusH2O Waterbrush Detailer is an empty compressible tube with a brush tip on the end. This lets you fill the tube with either water for blending, or an ink soloution (or I suppose really any thin liquid) letting you brush with it. It took a few tries to get the right balance of ink and water for a nice grey, I'm not sure what the combination was, but I'm guessing somwhere near half and half. I put the water/ink in a sink and submerged the tube while compressed and let it fill with water.

When applying the ink, changing the pressure you apply on the tube will push more of your solution onto the brush tip, but if you squeeze even a little to hard the point where the brush meets the tube will leak although I found it fairly easy to control after a few tries on a scrap of paper. Before this, I would have dipped my pen in ink, then water and hoped for the best, but this is a really nice solution (ha!) to producing a nice and faily constant grey:

But....

This revealed a crucial flaw in the Kuratake pens; They're not waterproof. Any amount of water applied to them will blur the fine lines created earlier. The waterproof Indian Ink that was applied with the Winsor & Newton brush stayed perfectly still on the page while the Kurake ink smudged. Anyone who wants to paint watercolour or grayscale over preserved fine sketching had best avoid the Kuratakes. Initially this did put me off, but I realised that for the sort of style I could create with this combination of pens, the grayscale sort of made fine hatching irrelevent.

Overall I'm really happy with these three brush/pens, and hopefully have more to show using them.

Update: Brush width comparisations: First line is finest line I could get with the brush/pen. The second line being the widest. In theory these should be actual size but I don't know how it will differ screen from screen:

Brush rolecall (In order of appearance above):

Kuretake Fudegokochi Brush - Fine,

Kuretake Fudegokochi Brush - Medium,

Zig BrusH2O Waterbrush Detailer (which I've just realised is branded Kuretake on the side)

Tombow ABT Dual Brush Pen Ink - Black

Faber-Castell Brush pen (bare in mind, mine is worn and running out)

Winsor & Newton paint brush and Winsor & Newtwon Black indian ink size 000, size 00 and size 2

A old thicker brush that I can't remember the name of and is quite worn away (used for filling balcks).

Quicky..

Only a quick blog today, just back from surfing up in Donegal over the weekend and tired. Great fun, although Aimee almost caught pneumonia in the cold sea and I may have lost a few brain cells from catching a couple surfboards to the head.

I came back to find some nice suprises in my RSS feeds anyway:

• I've been following Ferret's virtual tour of her quilt gallery at the 2009 Festival of Quilts, and eagerly awaiting more pictures of the Bad Rain piece on display. They were finally posted yesterday and you can see the Cancertown inspirded quilt in all its glory on Ferret's blog. You'll also find a quilt potrait on writer Cy Dethan, amoung other fantastic quilts such as Phoenix Rising and Heat.


• I also found to my complete surpise some Cancertown sketches from Northern Irish artist Darren Reynolds on his blog. I love his interpretations and really hope to see them in person if he brings them along to the next Belfast comics creators meetup. I only really know Darren's art through his blog, but I love his style and really want to see more.

Anyway, here is a full panel of Slaughterman's Creed art (that I've cropped and been using for my twitter profile) in colour. This is Sidney, the Slaughterman, he's meant to be quite pale, but I think I might increase the contrast a little, just to make sure the colour definiton isn't lost when going to print.

Yes, you're next.

Shades of grey..

I finished up my work on Bob Heske's Demented story for the 2012 Anthology last week and since the book will be printed in glorious black and white, I went back and greyscaled the whole thing. Didn't take too long (did all eight pages in less than 2 days) and I think it really adds a good bit to the finished look. Here's the panel I showed in my previous post with the added grey.
Tools used to add the grey were simply Photoshop CS4, my Compaq (that Aimee and her family bought me for christmas to replace my 6 year old Sharp that could barely run PS) and the Wacom Bamboo tablet/pen seen sitting on it. The Bamboo is the cheapest of the Wacom tablets, but does the job alright for greyscaling and colouring (I'm working my way through colouring Slaughterman's Creed at the minute). For those who don't know, these types of tablets are sensitive to the the pressure and angle of the pen, so you can get a brush-like effect; changing lines weight and size) but my dream tablet would be the Wacom Cintiq, with which you can draw onto the actual screen with the same sensitivity.

The background of my laptop is "Wally Wood's 22 panels that always work" that can give inspiration when you need a fresh angle o na page.