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. 

Vampires! Zombies! Cowboys!!

I've had this idea for doing a Zombie Western in my head for a while. I had mentioned it to Andrew Croskery at one of the Belfast comic creators meet ups, back when Kronos City was but a twinkle in his eye (and some very messy notes in a book; the guy writes everything on paper first then begrudingly types it up) and he was intrigued by the idea.


We were going to enter the Gaurdian comic strip competition with it and Andrew promptly wrote a 19 panel strip that would stretch over two broadsheet pages. Then of course I looked at the actual deadline and it was something like a few days away. I was in the middle of drawing Cancertown at the same time so unfortunetely it wasn't doable, but I had managed to work up some character sketches based on Andrew's script.

But never fear, I know by now you are virtually begging to see more of these characters, and you are in luck! We've reworked the script as a four page story and found a home for it in an anthology coming up next year. Andy Brown of Berserker comics will be painting over my pencils and it should make make for a nice collaboration.

Andrew also has some character designs (he's a bit of an artist as well you see) for a few of the characters so if you go over to his blog and ask him nicely he might show them to you.

Speaking of Andrew and Kronos City, if you havn't checked out the multitude of artist interpretations of Karl, the anorexic vampire, over on the Kronos City blog then you are missing out on some lovely art. Here's my own version (there are 13 more on the blog):

'Til next time.