6 inked pages! I wish every week could be this damn productive. Proper inking takes a bit longer than the digi ink approach I tried for Sparko 2 (which made everything look gummy and a bit too cartoony), and a fuckload less...... pencill....yyy:) than the high contrast pencil gimmick I used in S1, but the end result is so much clearer and makes me feel a little like some sort of geek rock star.
I also find I need to spend less time toning if I ink properly because most of the shading gets realized in the hatching and texturing.
All in all I'm about halfway with S3. Well, actually more than halfway because I've done all the pencils more or less and 50% of the inks, most of which have been toned already. In other words, I may actually live to finish this monster someday and maybe catch up on all the sleep I missed out on in '09.
Below are some old entries, cut and pasted from my old LJ account. I tried exporting from LJ and uploading to Blogger manually (and later with third party software) but no beans. Oh well, at least I got the chance to do some needed editing.
SPARKO 2 27 May 2009 @ 02:13 am
...is done and will start running at slgcomic.com soon. I'll spamwhore everyone when the time comes for such things.
STUFF
19 February 2009 @ 11:59 am
Here's a quick rundown of what I've been up to:
Some paintings for a friend's health food store
These are approved character sketches for an upcoming children's book I've been commissioned to illustrate.
A rejected page from my SPARKO graphic novel.
SPARKO has been taking up the lion's share of my time. I'm currently inking Part 2 and gaining some good ground of what has thus far proved to be a major fucking challenge. I might post some work in progress pages later.
Here's the final Caustic pin up I did over the weekend, lovingly molested in Potatoshop. So much for the trad approach.
Sketchbook - knob fiddler
15 November 2008 @ 05:56 am
I've started my sabbatical and before throwing myself at my comic I decided to take a break from all that sequential jazz and do a caricature. I don't have much trad ink work in my portfolio, so I decided to give the PC
a break for a while and do the whole damn thing by hand. I dare say, it doesn’t look half shit. I'll make an effort to colour it in later. This one's of Matt Fanale, the self-styled 'Mister Bungle of Industial', better kno
wn as CAUSTIC,the one man band that brought us such classics as "Mmm papscraper I love you", "Emanuel Lewis Handjob" and "The reason I broke up with you is a million reasons you psychotic wang". If you're into powernoise and have a healthy sense of humour, keep an eye on this guy, he's really going places (no, really,he's going places, call the cops!!!!).
Sketchkook - party clown, pen & ink 29 October 2008 @ 01:21 pm
SPARKO 19 August 2008 @ 01:06 pm
I’m doing a graphic novel to be published by SLG Comics next year. You don’t have to wait till then to start reading it though, because it is featuring as a web comic on SLG’s website, updated weekly. Here, have some blurbage:
“Sparko is a dark offbeat fairytale about a near-death experience by which the main character, Norman, is exposed to the strange inhabitants of the dingy fantasy realm that exists beneath London’s streets. He soon finds himself locked in a journey that will force him to confront the truth about his girlfriend’s untimely death, and face the evil that
dwells in the river Thames.
It’s a cautionary tale about not letting your problems get the better of you, but with a healthy dose of ghosts, monsters, killer chihuahuas and people going round bashing each other’s heads in to keep the reader’s entertainment levels in the red from cover to cover.”
Anyone who has ever lived in London will know it has this enveloping gloom that permeates absolutely everything. I could well imagine that if someone was to give in to the misery, it could suck them in and turn them into one of those creepy glue-sniffing bin people who are always hanging around the super market car park and hounding you for exactly 27p (I mean, WTF?!). I imagined myself in that situation, wasted and on rock bottom, completely consumed by the tragedy that is my own existence. I then proceeded to give my character hell, kicking his pathetic needy arse as much and as often as possible at every conceivable opportunity. I added a weird, alternative reality for a setting and ended up with the first draft for Sparko.
Basically, I wanted to do a comedy with the same premise as Neverwhere, but with the relentless nosebleed-inducing staccato pace of Alan Martin’s Tank Girl. The end result is
a racy, nightmarish (and somewhat bipolar) ride through the bowels of the world’s glummest city.
I’m well chuffed to have my stuff out there for people to see, and through SLG no less, the hippest publishing cats around, dig?
6 inked pages! I wish every week could be this damn productive. Proper inking takes a bit longer than the digi ink approach I tried for Sparko 2 (which made everything look gummy and a bit too cartoony), and a fuckload less...... pencill....yyy:) than the high contrast pencil gimmick I used in S1, but the end result is so much clearer and makes me feel a little like some sort of geek rock star.
