Doodles!

I promised more content, and so here it is:

This comic was an attempt to homage Kate Beaton's brilliant work. How much that actually comes across is perhaps debatable, so I thought I would spell it out here just to be sure.

Whenever I do Transformers pictures, I always get the feeling that the joke has probably been done a thousand times before. Yet I draw them anyway, because Transformers are so fun to draw! It was not until I had finished this picture that I realised that Optimus had found a shop that sells some damned big groceries. Feel free to assume that either he had found some planet full of giant, G1 weirdness, or else he had a moment of strange shifting proportions, like that episode where Soundwave tripped over a tree root.

In other news, here is some recently revealed work by Christov and Lee Bates. I am drawing your attention to this not only because it deserves to be seen, but also because Lee is working on a strip with me, the afore mentioned one about pirates. This is an event that fills me with much excitement.

I'm Back!

Phew, February was a bit dead here wasn't it? Some (one) readers of this blog that I know in the "Real World" have expressed admonishment over my recent lack of posts. This has largely come about because I have been working exclusively on Van Dom's super-duper secret project, and am as such unable to reveal the rightly guarded mysteries of Vandemonium . I did find some other stuff in those archives I have mentioned, but filling my blog with embarrassing relics didn't seem like a wise thing to do without newer work to go alongside it.

Then lo! A solution came from that lovecraftian chaos realm that is... The Web! Over on the 2000ad forum, Chris Askham presented the idea of an Art Blog. Such a concept will be familiar to all those who have studied the "Pass-Around-Mobiliary-Art" discovered beneath the previously hidden city of Commoriom; but for those who have not kept up to date with recent developments in Pseudo-Crypto-Paleo-Hyperborean-Art-History, I shall provide a brief summary.

The idea is that an eclectic assortment of adventurers from every walk of life would once a week take time out from their dazzling heists, quests for vengeance, Antarctic expeditions and the like, to bring into one place a small sketch that celebrates the nature of a theme chosen at random by one of their merry band.

Thus was born The Weely Themed Art Blog, or the Weekly TAB for short. The first theme chosen was Exorcism, and following the link will take you to a great many interpretations of that single word, revelling in the flexibility of language and the diversity of human vision.

 
Here is my effort. In case it isn't clear, it's Nemesis dragging the ghost of Torquemada, by the nose, out of a possessed Terminator. I was originally going to do something involving Solomon Kane, having recently been reading The Castle of the Devil which is brilliant. Then my Wonderful Ladyfriend suggested this idea instead, which I instantly went for because I love drawing Nemesis. 

With the Weekly TAB being... er... weekly, I should be able to get a half decent sketch on this blog every seven days. Then I just need to throw up some other work occasionally, and this blog will once again have content. Huzzar, content!

Raiding The Lost Vault of Kor-Avul-Thaa

By which I mean; I have recently been searching through a portable hard-drive filled with time lost curiosities. Hidden within were various writings and pieces of art that had been left on an old house-mate's computer. Sifting through them was a bit like opening a secret portal into the past, and though it was a past not too distant, it is still a disturbing and unsettling place to visit. There were extracts from my woeful dissertation, photos of the skulls of species long extinct, and toe bones, lots of toe bones.

There was also a variety of sketches, entries into art competitions, and a collection of ideas for a Lovecraftian kid's fun activity book, which is a project I really need to revisit one day. Then there was the Random Violence art.

Random Violence is a board game being produced by a friend of mine, and back at university I was doing some artwork for it. The game was like a table-top version of Unreal Tournament, set in a near future cyber-punkish Japan. My brief was to make the character cards, which would show the character you were playing, and also be covered in lots of statistics and boxes that you would put equipment cards on and such like.

The necessity to put in lots of information goes some way towards explaining  why there is so much dead space here, but this is also due to these pieces representing my very first experiments at making art using a computer. You will notice I used colour! You will notice I didn't really know what I was doing! You will notice I haven't worked this way since!

Tattered Remains Of The Holiday Season

Way back at the beginning of December, I made this post about the 2000ad Christmas Calendar.

Well, Christmas has come to an end, and the calendar has been completed. Now, there is a lot of good stuff over there, and everyone involved put a lot of love into the project, but my incredibly biased opinion leads me to pick Party Crash! as my personal favourite piece.

Yes, Party Crash is a Choose Your Own Adventure surrounding a 2000ad office party attended by all your favourite characters. I say "surrounding" the party because, if you are anything like me, it may take you a few goes to actually get in there. It was written by one Van Doom, and illustrated by a whole host of talent

For this gargantuan feat of collaboration, I managed to call shotgun on drawing a picture of Slaine having a bit of a warp spasm. I first encountered Slaine in secondary school, and if they still existed, my English rough books would be full of doodles of twisted Irishmen spurting oil out of their head all over the place. It was this rough sketch quality that I wanted to revisit in this picture; a bit of seasonal nostalgia that only I would feel nostalgic for.

So, that's it for the Christmas posts until next December. All that remains is for me to put up this picture which I made to finish last year's calendar.

Where To Find My Stuff

You know how just before Christmas I posted a link to Lugal, claiming I would make the post look all pretty once I had returned to York? Well, this is that post.

 

That name in the credits? The one next to the word 'Art'? That's my name! I am more than a little pleased to see such a thing. It was only around Easter 2010 that I decided to get back into drawing, and now, as we leave that year behind, I have both a blog to show off my work, and a published credit to my name.

How can you see this fine story? Simply cast your eyes to the margin on the right, where you will find a list of Places My Work Has Found Print. It is but a paltry list at present, but I have high hopes for its growth over the coming year. 

Lugal Rises!

I'm stuck in the internet deprived wasteland that is My Partents House. I've just nipped into the library to find that Temple APA issue 8 is up and downloadable. So, you should all just go read it, cause a comic that I have drawn is in it.

GO HERE! DOWNLOAD LUGAL!

This is that comic I said I would link to in my next post, several posts ago. Well, I found other stuff to talk about. These things happen.

Later, I will smarten this post up, make it look nice, correct the spellings, and such like. Right now, the timer in the corner of the screen is ticking down to zero, so I need to be off!

Christmas Time Is Here Again!

Due to my recent discovery of the stats page, I realise that people from all over the world check out this blog (thanks all!), and I'm guessing that many of you will be mocking our joy of snow. Here in the Gulf Stream, however, this is a BIG DEAL!
Yet snow is not the only indicator of festivity. Today has seen the start of the 2000ad Advent Calendar 2010. This long standing tradition is now in its second year, and you can catch the collected edition of the first one here!

I haven't put my name down for this year's calendar, as time is pressing against me. However, Dirk Van Dom has come up with a wonderful idea that I will be contributing towards, along with a host of others. The allotted day for this is not until the 22nd, so you will have a bit of a wait before this inevitable masterpiece is unleashed.

Until then, I thought I might as well chuck my entry from last year up here; keep all my work in one place, and the like. This effort was valiantly lettered by Bolt-01 (AKA David Evans), who volunteered to do the job without realising that when I threw out my general lettering request, I hadn't even decided what I was going to do. The result is a story where I drew the art with a vague idea in mind, then wrote the dialogue based on what I thought might fit into the pictures.

I didn't always guess quite right, but Bolt did the job without a negative word. Thanks Bolt!