Leighton Johns

Merrier Christmas!

2011-12-23T06:49:00.006Z

Thought I could do a bit better in terms of festive posts than yesterday's rather sombre one, so here's an old old sketch of old saint Nick from the archives.

Merry Christmas!

Ave Maria

2011-12-22T06:49:00.009Z

The most festive looking recent piece of work I could find (well it's got stars and a bit of snow on it) was this pretty grim cover for Graham Thomas' Western psycho-drama Maria & The Devil. Checkout the book's microsite for more details (and some really nice interior illustrations by the author).

Below: My original digital paintings for the front and rear of the book.

The Bear Who Loved Me

2011-10-19T08:31:00.006+01:00

Another one from Misery Bear's Guide to Love & Heartbreak, published by Hodder & Stoughton.

This one's my love letter to the poster art of Frank McCarthy, Robert McGinnis, and Dan Goozee (along with anyone else I might have ripped-off along the way).

Art direction by Misery Bear (with some help from Chris Hayward and Nat Saunders).

Thanks to Misery Bear for putting my drawings in his book, and I hope he remembers me when he's a Hollywood superstar.

Bear with the Wind (after Terpning and Jung)

2011-10-17T12:15:00.006+01:00

One of Misery Bear's Hollywood fantasies from his new book Misery Bear's Guide to Love & Heartbreak. On sale now!

Illustration by me, Art Direction by Misery Bear (as interpreted by Chris Hayward).

Misery Bear Unleashed

2011-10-14T14:22:00.006+01:00

Yesterday saw the launch of Misery Bear's first book - Misery Bear's Guide to Love & Heartbreak. Having illustrated a couple of MB's escapist fantasies for the publication, I got to hang out at the launch party last night. Everyone was very friendly and seemed to be having a lot of fun... except the bear of course who spent the evening slouched in a corner, staring mournfully into plate of sausage rolls. What a loser!

I'll be posting some of my contributions for the book shortly, but if you can't wait for that (and who in their right mind could?) get down to your local bookshop and buy it yourself or at least have a quick flick through before returning home and ordering it from amazon.

Find out more about the bear here stalk him here, say things to him here.

Beat Boards - The Big Climactic Showdown!

2011-09-15T10:06:00.004+01:00

The Second half of the beat boards for the sample cartoon episode I worked on. Here its Monsters versus Mad Scientist and Android Kids!

Beat Boards

2011-09-14T08:43:00.009+01:00

Some more concept art for the Cartoon series being developed by Studio Cheese. This time some beat boards for a sample episode. Actually just half the episode here - thought I'd leave it on a cliffhanger.

Cartoon concept art

2011-09-09T10:30:00.003+01:00

Here's some concept art I did for a fantastic Cartoon series in development at Studio Cheese. This was used in a brochure/presentation pack to help sell the idea. Monsters, Aliens, Evil geniuses... how difficult can it be to sell that?

Hot Pot Royale

2011-09-01T07:22:00.012+01:00

A recent storyboarding exercise, trying to get a cross-cutting gag down in under 15 panels.

Back to Brandenburg

2011-08-30T08:52:00.003+01:00

Here's another illustration for Graham Thomas' Hats of to Brandenburg. This one's for the back of the novel. The parchment is blank to accommodate the book's blurb, not because I couldn't be bothered to finish it.
HOTB publisher TheNeverPress now have a facebook page too.

Misery Bear: My part in his exploitation

2011-08-26T09:14:00.003+01:00

Miserablist internet sensation, Misery Bear, got in touch earlier this year asking me to help him 'colour in some drawings' for his new book - Misery Bear's Guide to Love & Heartbreak. After laughing in his despondent face for several minutes I finally took pity on him, and agreed to help, after all who knows what mess he would have made with a pen... the guy has no hands. So I churned out some second rate scribbles in a couple of minutes, just to keep him happy... well as happy as he's ever likely to get.

You can see the depressing results of this collaboration when the tome is published by Hodder & Stoughton on October 13th, 2011. If you've got nothing better to do with your time or money you could pre-order your copy at amazon or waterstones. Go on... do your bit to keep the bear in booze.

You can find more info and enjoy some teddy related schadenfreude here
Join everyone in filling the drunk bum with false hope on facebook
Or you can follow the fluffy loser on twitter.

Chuck Randomness

2011-08-25T08:04:00.007+01:00

Here's a colour warm up sketch I did of Charlton Heston as Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar in the 1961 epic El Cid.
What I was actually working on at the time had nothing to do with El Cid, but there you go...

Hats off to Brandenburg - A guided tour of the cover.

2011-08-24T08:30:00.004+01:00

A closer look at the characters and events featured on the cover to Graham Thomas' Hats off to Brandenburg. Kicking off above with the main man (men?) Benjamin Ananas/Count Abraham von Brandenburg. The would be saviour of the Roxy Playhouse, he must delve deep into his tragic past to create a character who can restore the fortunes of the ailing theatre.

Archie Enfield - Benjamin's closest friend and the Roxy's resident lothario.

Desiree - The beautiful Perugian ballerina who discovers another talent in the field of swordplay, all in the service of the Roxy.

Gertie - The one time urchin, now ever ready with his butterfly net should wire walker Anya take a fall from the rafters.

Kemble - Disease ridden maniac, and recurring villain of the piece. This is what happens when bad actors turn really bad.

The Coach Duel - One of the novel's set piece action scenes, breathtaking feats of daring do on the cobbled streets of ye olde London town.

Find out more at www.theroxyplayhouse.com

Hats off to Brandenburg - Cover

2011-08-22T19:50:00.006+01:00

My cover illustration for the forthcoming Regency set caper novel - Hats off to Brandenburg. Described pretty accurately by author Graham Thomas as 'Ocean's Eleven out drinking with the Scarlet Pimpernel', you can find out more at www.theroxyplayhouse.com and follow the lead up to the launch on facebook.

The brief was to create something like a Drew Struzan poster from the 19th Century. The book's website also has a nice artwork section charting the development of the cover design from initial sketches to the finished image above.

Royal Wedding Cover

2011-04-29T14:34:00.009+01:00

Here's the front page illustration I did for The Richmond and Twickenham Times' special Royal Wedding issue on sale today.

Below are a couple of early idea sketches.

Students

2011-02-12T13:44:00.008Z

A few old pencil sketches I revisited recently to test some quick colour rendering techniques. They were originally produced for St Mary's University College, Twickenham. The College was working on a presentation for it's 'widening participation scheme' . This was aimed at groups of secondary school pupils who may not have thought of going into higher education.

The pupils were given four fictional characters of their own age, with varying interests and asked to match them with suitable HE courses. So for instance, above is Sonia, who wants to do a degree in geology or something similar and has a passion for volcanoes (!?). Her interests include conservation and wildlife, and rock climbing. She would like to be able to have a year abroad as part of the course, maybe in the USA.

It was a lot of fun coming up with unlikely scenarios in which visual references to all these interests and hobbies might fit, and as I remember the presentation was a big success. Maybe they should have done a follow up session a few years later to determine whether graduate Sonia and co go in for a career in fast food, retail assistance, call centres or professional charity fundraising.

Attack of the Aten

2011-02-11T19:36:00.018Z

I'm not sure this is appropriate timing with all that's been going on in Egypt over the last few days, but here goes. With the resignation of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak after eighteen days of pro-democracy demonstrations, there's been much talk in the news today of a 'new dawn' for Egypt. All this reminded me of the above painting I'd worked on a little while ago. It was intended as a follow up to or further adventure of my Jake Fast young pulp hero character.

The idea sprang from a visit to the UN building in New York a few years ago where hangs a replica of the USSR's first satellite Sputnik 1 (below).

I was struck by the similarity to representations in Egyptian art of the many armed Sun God - Aten (below)

It was easy to see how somebody of the Erich von Daniken school of Ancient History might jump to the conclusion that the Aten was some kind of sputnik-like piece of alien (or advanced Egyptian/Atlantean/Lumerian?) technology.

I started playing with the idea that the Aten, which during the reign of Akhenaten became the sole deity in Egypt, was just such a malign alien force, using it's superior technology to pose as a God.

Eventually (in my pulp history) the Egyptians rise up against the Aten, but unable destroy it trap it in a subterranean chamber. Millennia pass. Sometime in the 1930s an archaeological dig unleashes the still functioning God-droid, which radios for reinforcements of its own kind from the stars. The Aten army then go on a 'War of the Worlds' style rampage of revenge across Egypt. Only one plucky schoolboy can stop them....

Pulp Inspiration

Initial sketch

First colour sketch, which as usual I prefer to the finished piece.

Anyway, good luck to the people of Egypt, and hopefully the sun disk that rises from their new dawn will be a little more kind on them than the one I envisioned above.

Flatmates Storyboard

2011-02-06T18:51:00.011Z

It's been a looooooong time since I posted anything, due to house moving, work and general laziness. So to ease me back into the blogosphere here's a post thats 90% reliant on the talent of others - a storyboard for a mockumentary sketch by mirthsmiths Chris Hayward and Nat Saunders. 'Flatmates' takes a look at what happens when a Fishing rod salesman finds himself sharing quarters with a member of the SAS.

Biblical Fireworks

2010-11-05T17:11:00.005Z

Another digital painting based on the somewhat speculative (but nonetheless fascinating) writing of Professor Mike Baillie (you can find one of my earlier attempts to visualise his theories here.)

In his book Exodus to Arthur, Baillie suggests that much of the imagery in the Biblical Book of Exodus may be the attempts of the ancient scribes to record a close encounter with a comet or swarm of comets. When the Bible describes how God brought the Israelites out of Egypt "with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm" Baillie sees it as evidence of the Hebrews following a fiery comet trail across the skies of the ancient Middle East. Not sure I buy this particular idea really, but I thought it would make an interesting image for the fifth of November.

death and the maiden

2010-10-29T07:52:00.012+01:00

Something a bit spooky looking for the Halloween weekend. I wanted to try something along the lines of George A. Wotherspoon's optical illusion illustration - Gossip: And Satan Came Also (below).

This had been on my mind ever since the 1999 release of Star Wars prequel The Phantom Menace. I'd decided that such a B-movie title deserved a B movie poster to go with it and I was just the person to design it.

I had an idea for it which involved the film's Sith Lord bad guys. I'd have the little seen puppet master Darth Sidious hooded and dominating the frame but with his face obscured by shadow. The features would be provided or at least suggested by a minature figure of his apprentice, Darth Maul, who is being conjured into existence out of smoke by his evil master. He'd be brandishing his double ended lightsabre which would provide the fiery eyes, whilst the nose, mouth and eyebrows could be formed out of Maul's body and robes. I thought this would be a nice way to illustrate the idea that Maul was the 'public face' of a more shadowy evil.

Of course none of this came to pass, due to laziness on my part or just life getting in the way. At some point earlier this year however I found myself with a spare few minutes to doodle in Photoshop and obviously must have had the Gossip/Phantom idea still floating around my subconscious as I started playing around with the idea again.

This time it was a more generic grim reaper figure holding a masked, gun-toting super heroine type in his hand. Not sure where that came from. The lady certainly seems to owe something to Dave Gibbons' costume design for the original Silk Spectre and maybe even Marvel's Silver Fox character.

The 'face' reminds me of something too, maybe an amalgam of the face in the magic mirror from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the face of the devil from the Night on Bald Mountain sequence in Fantasia. Both Disney horrors strangely.

Below are my original Photoshop doodles. Hope you don't meet this couple on Sunday.

More Elephants on Parade

2010-10-28T07:09:00.005+01:00

My previous post reminded me about these elephant character concepts I'd sketched out sometime ago. Obviously I spent a considerable amount of time researching the species in order to reflect their physiology and habits before working on the character. I don't recall those we met in Zambia guzzling tea and wearing life jackets though. Maybe that's what the Indian variety get up to?

Elephants on Parade

2010-10-27T10:48:00.009+01:00

One of the reasons for my recent absence from this blog was a trip to Zambia. Whilst there we came across these big fellas who'd just strolled in from neighbouring Zimbabwe. One of them took an interest in us and to our surprise decided to wander over and take a closer look.

We also came across this thirsty specimen below, busy drinking up most of the Zambezi.

He also seemed to be interested in us...

And was happy to demonstrate his strength for the camera by attempting to pull down the nearest tree using its creepers...!

Unfortunately this was not entirely succesful, and after a number of failed attempts the big lad was forced to call it a day and wandered off in a bit of a huff having been bested by a plant.

AOI Images 34 - Private View

2010-09-13T22:00:00.006+01:00

Some images of my work and the work of other exhibitors at the opening of the Images 34 exhibition at LCC, 7th September.

AOI Images 34 - Book and Exhibition

2010-09-06T07:35:00.014+01:00

Around this time last year I entered my Jake Fast pulp cover into the Association of Illustrators Images 34 competition.

'Images' is the UK's leading jury-selected illustration annual and touring exhibition and I was lucky enough to get a place in both. Tomorrow I'm off to the private view at London College of Communication, where the exhibition kicks off. The exhibition runs at LCC from 8th to 14th September before moving on to other sites around the UK. Take a look at the AOI website where you can find out more about the exhibition and its opening times as well ordering a copy of the annual.

Dogmonsterthings

2010-08-13T07:43:00.002+01:00

A final bit of sketchwork unearthed from my Skulduggery Pleasant project. This was a design for the cave dwelling dog monster. My idea was to try and combine the dogthing from John Carpenters excellent 'The Thing' (1982) with Paris Hilton. Terrifying!

Ghastly Bespoke

2010-08-05T18:58:00.002+01:00

More preparatory character sketches from my Skulduggery Pleasant file. This time scar-faced tailor, Ghastly Bespoke.

More VBatz than RPatz

2010-08-03T20:00:00.009+01:00

Whilst cleaning out my files recently I came across these sketches. They were ideas for the vampire characters featured on my Skulduggery Pleasant tribute poster. Vampires today seem a generally good looking, sexy bunch (Twilight, True Blood etc.) so it was nice to try and visualise Derek Landy's more revoltingly visaged version of the undead. The two designs at the top in particular were inspired by the look of actual vampire bats (Desmodus Rotundus), creatures who unfortunately are neither sexy or good looking.

Queen of Hearts

2010-07-21T08:54:00.004+01:00

I was asked to do a caricature of a friend for her recent Hen party. The theme of the party was Alice in Wonderland and the bride to be was given the role of the Queen of Hearts. Above is my digitally painted version.

My line art here expertly coloured by Carrie Edwards and placed in appropriate playing card frame.

The Sarah playing card on display at the Hen party.

The bride to be was also given a Sami Teasdale designed Hen party costume and the jacket incorporated an iron on transfer of my illustration. Checkout Sami's blog for full details of the amazing finished costume along with all other accessories created for the Hen and army of Henettes.

(All photography courtesy of Sami Teasdale)

The Raising of Osiris part 2

2010-07-08T14:04:00.002+01:00

Above is my final version of the Isis and Osiris piece for the IFX cover competition, and below is how I arrived at it.

As mentioned in the previous post I didn't want to attempt a realistic histroically accurate rendering of the characters (after all they were mythological not historical). They did have to reflect their Egyptian background however so in terms of costume I was looking more at our modern theatrical interpretation of 'Egyptian' style. My Isis then is a sort of composite of many interpretations of the female Egyptian figure, from classical paintings, opera, film, and comics.

Isis Inspiration: Clockwise from top left, detail from Cleopatra before Caesar by Jean Leone Gerome, (1866) ; 1920s Egyptian ballet costume; Claudette Colbert in Cleopatra (1934); Abadazad cover, Mike Ploog (2006); Promethea cover, Alex Ross (1999).

In original Egyptian paintings Osiris as lord of death and resurrection is almost always portrayed with green skin, which helped suggest a supernatural aspect to his person in the illustration. Isis' divinity in Egyptian art isn't always so obvious. She looks like a normal woman, though sometimes she is given wings. I thought the wings would give me some trouble in terms of the composition so I swapped this supernatural attribute with one from another Egyptian goddess. Nut, goddess of the sky was often appropriately shown with blue skin so I decided to give Isis this colouring. Hopefully the blue skin says she's not just any old Egyptian lady enjoying a spot of necromancy - she knows exactly what she's up to. Over the centuries many Eyptian gods and goddesses merged or took on the attributes of others so I didn't think it would be too bad to add a little Nut-blue to the Queen of Egypt here.

As this was going to be a cover design I tried to work within the confines of the publication's cover template (supplied by IFX). I started off with a line drawing that I added a tonal layer to, then I played with different colour washes over this to see how they worked with the cover typography.

I went on to paint over the line drawing and tonal layers in monochrome. I then built up the colour using transparent soft light layers in photoshop. Finally some alterations were made in another colour paint layer in Painter. For instance Isis' face and make-up details were changed slightly (see below).

So that's it, but we can still look forward to seeing who actually won the competition when their entry appears on the cover... sometime soon hopefully.

The Raising of Osiris part1

2010-07-06T16:15:00.002+01:00

Sometime late last year Imagine FX magazine ran a competition to design one of their covers. I had some time on my hands at Christmas so I thought why not? I've got no idea what happened to that competition (don't seem to have heard any mention of the winners yet) but above are three rough colour compositions I did to get started.

My idea was based on the Egyptian myth of the resurrection of Osiris by Isis. The main reason for this was that IFX covers tend to feature a beautiful and exotic (often scantily clad) female in a mythological or science fiction/ fanatasy setting. The mythological figure of Isis seemed to fit the bill, and as far as I'm aware hasn't appeared on the cover before.

Isis is the archetypal great woman behind a great man. When Osiris is killed and dismembered at the hands of the evil god Seth, Isis sets out in search of his body. After a long quest and with the help of several other gods, Isis eventually located all the pieces, then reassembled the body, and using her healing and magical powers restored Osiris to life.

The legend gives you some great classic visual cues. The finale is both a pieta and a resurrection scene, whilst the binding together of Osiris' body and the resurrection by magical means bring to mind elements of classic Universal horror ('The Mummy', 'Frankenstein'), and the Egyptian setting allows for Cecil B. Demille style spectacular costumes. So this is what I decided to focus on.

La Pieta (1499) by Michelangelo

Young Frankenstein (1974)

Cleopatra (1934)

Vulcan on a Post-it note

2010-06-23T07:40:00.002+01:00

Newborn - final version

2010-06-15T21:35:00.009+01:00

Compositional sketches and final artwork for my 'Newborn' submission from last year. I think the composition might have been stolen from a Hallmark Christmas card I remember from childhood. The foreground Holy family have been replaced by the Buck Rogers type with his lovely Droid wife and wailing biomechanoid sprog. Background-wise the little town of Bethlehem has morphed into a more opulent Alex Raymond style city whilst a Flash Gordon rocket streaks across the sky instead of the traditional star.

Newborn - devolopments

2010-06-15T07:17:00.005+01:00

I wanted the characters in my 'Newborn' entry to have a retro feel. This was going to be more fantasy than hard science fiction - leaning more to the surreal even. So the biomechanical baby is an impossible melding of machine and biology rather than an attempt to design a realistic cyborg child. With that and the retro influence in mind much of his design was based on old tin toys from the 30s to 50s.

Newborn - sketches

2010-06-10T08:11:00.005+01:00

Below, some ideas I had for ConceptArt.org's 'Newborn' contest. The competition from late 2009 asked you to “Bring Something Into the World” or “To Life”. I was thinking along the lines of a new biomechanical species - brought about through a literal marriage of man and machine.

WIP Hobgoblin

2010-06-09T10:06:00.002+01:00

Another Gobbolino based sketch, this time for the character of the cream thieving Hobgoblin who gets the hapless witch's cat into more trouble. I was going for a Gremlin/Salacious B. Crumb approach for the character, but he looks a bit like a demented smurf in that cap of his. Something else came up before I got a chance to finish working on him so he remains, like the rest of my Gobbolino ideas a WIP.

Gobbolino - Cat among the Toads

2010-06-08T07:31:00.007+01:00

Here's little Gobbolino after being flung to the back of the witches cave amongst the toads, dismissed because of his white sock and blue eyes. I wanted it to have a classic fairytale feel and also wanted to try a pen and ink effect. I spent a lot of time looking at the great black and white illustrators and cartoonists of the past (Joseph Clement Coll, A. B. Frost, Thomas Sullivant, Heinrich Kley, James Montgomery Flagg), and modern masters of the medium (Bernie Wrightson, Mike Kaluta, Gary Gianni), and then stopped because it was getting too depressing.

Of course I'm far too cowardly to try this with real pen and ink so I tried to see if I could replicate the effect with Painter's digital Pens and Calligraphy 'brushes'. I also had a quick experiment with adding a colour wash using Photoshop's wet media brushes (see below).

Witch Toads

2010-06-03T10:46:00.001+01:00

Preparation for my Gobbolino illustration.

Witch Cats

2010-06-02T07:40:00.005+01:00

Sometime late last year I decided to try and illustrate a few scenes from Ursula Moray Williams' classic children's book Gobbolino the Witches Cat. Some of these scenes require Gobbolino to walk on his two back feet, so above are my attempts to visualise how this might look.

Web of Philip Reeve

2010-06-01T17:26:00.007+01:00

World of Mortal Engines Artwork found at philipreeve.blogspot.com: Clockwise from top left - Mortal Engines cover by Leighton Johns (thats me!), US version of Fever Crumb cover by Sam Weber, Early design for Mr Shrike by Philip Reeve, Anna Fang by Alice Duke, Sample Graphic Novel Artwork by David Wyatt, London by Christian Bravery.

I came across Mortal Engines author Philip Reeve's blog recently. As well as finding news about the author's work, and visuals by official cover artists such as David Wyatt and Sam Weber I was more than a little surprised to find in a post titled 'Now That's What I Call a Cover!' my own version of of the first novel's jacket which I'd mocked up for my own amusement. Its pretty thrilling to get a thumbs up from the creator of a fantastical world you've spent hours exploring in your mind!
Mr Reeve, an accomplished illustrator in his own right, has been good enough to use his blog to promote the work of other artists and illustrators who've been inspired by his books. These include talents like Chris Goff, Alice Duke and Christian Bravery. So thanks to Philip for sharing his vision of a future earth with us and for sharing the various interpretations of his work (including my own) with the web.

At Easter no one can hear you scream...

2010-04-01T12:15:00.009+01:00

The Easter bunny does his best to bring holiday cheer to the colony of LV426.

Fish-Headed boy unleashed

2010-04-01T11:50:00.006+01:00

The last of my fish-headed boy sketches (for the foreseeable at least, check out the others below). Here the mischievous fish side of the character finally makes good his escape from the boy's body to rampage through a lake.

The fish side of the head feasts on a poor little goldfish whilst the boy side looks on in righteous indignation, and the body searches beneath the waters for it's absconded noggin.

Fish-Headed boy on display

2010-03-31T09:10:00.005+01:00

More fish-headed boy sketches (see below for the rest). Here the little fella finds himself back on display in his sideshow tank. He's trying to rise above it though, keeping his head in his school books and ignoring the gawping crowds.

One thing he can't ignore though are the tendencies of his own fishy side. Uninterested in the bookishness of his other self, the fish head is happier chasing guppies around the tank - which doesn't help with homework.

Fish-Headed boy about town

2010-03-30T19:35:00.003+01:00

More work on the Fish-Headed boy. This time he's out of his tank and on his way to school. The geeky school boy side of him is loving the chance to meet other kids and learn about life outside of the carny. The fish side of his personality isn't so happy, he's going to have to be stuck inside that bowl/helmet all day... unless he can hatch a plan to escape to open water.

The Return of the Fish-Headed Boy

2010-03-23T11:55:00.013Z

Sometime last year I did something I think most people would advise against, I revisited old work. Above are the results of my digital rejigging, below are the original 10 year old seeds of the idea (I mean they were done ten years ago -not when I was ten, though it might look that way).

The original fish headed boy was an idea I came up with in my final year of Uni. It was a segment of a short animated film based in a travelling freakshow.

Each sequence or act was introduced by a carnival style poster -

The film was all done in ye olde worlde style with rostrum cameras, pencils, paint and about a million trees worth of paper. Here's just one of the gazillion frames I forced my friends to help colour. It shows poor little Orco the Fish-headed boy sitting in his tank all alone save for some fishy friends.

The film was all about visual trickery. I was taking the kind of thing seen in 17th century 'upside down face' illustrations (see horse face below) and applying it to the medium of animation where you not only the option of viewing things either 'up' or 'down' but could also rotate an object and view it from a multitude of angles to create different illusions.

What I wanted to do with the fish headed boy then was create a character who was an animated illusion - so from certain angles he would look like a boy (well a cartoon boy at least) and from other angles he would look like a fish (ok, a cartoony looking fat shark!). I can never explain this concept very well so I'll just let my original story boards do the talking (click for close-ups)...

Got it? Good. So hopefully you can tell that I also wanted the duality of the design to have some bearing on the personality of the character. He's a dual personality in many ways, an aquatic Jekyll and Hyde. While his boy self wants to go play with other kids, or sit in his tank and do his homework, his fish side wants to break free and swim around eating other fish.

The real point here is that the original execution of the idea was pretty bad but I still think the idea itself was interesting and worth going back to. So here endeth the apologia, I'll be posting some more recent visual explorations of the wet little freak soon.

Airman - Fan Art

2010-03-15T07:34:00.015Z

Yet another bit of young-fiction fan art framed as a cover redesign. This time its Eoin Colfer's brilliant historical yarn of an airborne Monte Cristo - Airman.

I first came across the novel in hardback in 2008 when it had a pretty dark and intriguing looking cover by Steve Stone. I thought it was an adult steampunk novel so austere was the design. It certainly grabbed my attention enough to get me reading the story. The cover also reflects a lot of darkness that's actually found within the book's pages, the young protagonist being wrongly imprisoned in a subterranean dungeon only to later wreak vengeance by night as a masked black clad figure.

Its by no means all stygian grimness however. The story is also more than a bit of an old-fashioned ripping yarn. It recalls the swashbuckling romance of Count of Monte Cristo, Prisoner of Zenda, and The Man in the Iron Mask only to meld them with the scientific speculation of Jules Verne and the sense of dramatic presentation latched onto by early costumed heroes from Zorro to Batman. I wanted to come up with a cover that reflected some of these influences. I wanted to approach it the way that illustrators of adventure stories of the past might have, artist such as N.C Wyeth or Frank Schoonover.

I started out by working on the look of the character, based on Colfer's descriptions,

then set about trying to put the character in a pose that would make the most of his costume, mode of transport and capture something of the more positive spirit of adventure in the book.

Once I'd sketched out a basic concept digitally I started a more detailed pencil drawing.

I then scanned the pencil drawing and started adding colour in Photoshop and Painter.

The problem I soon ran into was that temptation by the dark side again. In the book Airman's costume is black, and he usually only flies at night - so I was going to have to work hard to inject some colour into this. I decided to use a bit of artistic license and allow him a daytime flight. I also hit on the idea of having him bursting out of an ornamental 19th century book cover. Not only did this allow us to introduce some vivid hues (red and gold were the colours of the Saltee flag - the story's location) it also alluded to the book's Victorian setting and it's major theme of escape.

Mortal Engines - a tribute

2010-03-11T09:06:00.015Z

I recently finished reading 'A Darkling Plain', the final book in Philip Reeve's 'Mortal Engines' quartet. So I thought it was about time I posted my homage to the original book here. Its a brilliant series of stories set in a post apocalyptic future where the major cities of the world are now mobile. Word is that Peter Jackson is currently looking at the possibility of filming this, which could be amazing.

I haven't got a lot of illustration of technology out there so I thought this would be a great subject to practice on, with a shot of the traction city of London dominating the story's protagonists.

I wanted to capture something of the feel of the wonder of technology that graced the covers of magazines like Popular Science, Modern Mechanix, and even science fiction like Amazing Stories.

My first shot at it was going well I thought but when I stood back from it I felt I'd gotten too involved in details and hadn't managed to capture the scale of the city.

For the second stab at it I tried a different approach, just starting off with a very rough sketch and going on to suggest detail with application of and colour and tone. I think it veers away from the vintage look but it felt a bit more dynamic. I tried to reintroduce some of the retro feel with the use of vintage looking typography, but somehow I sort of prefer the bright skied final image below.

One final thing to note. When I originally bought these books they had beautifully inked illustrations by David Frankland, which also lent them a nostalgic feel. I thought my more fully rendered style would make an interesting different take on the subject. No sooner had I finished my version however than the books were republished with new covers illustrated digitally by the fabulous David Wyatt.

Not only was the technique the same but even the composition of a couple of the books were very similar with low angle shots of the traction cities looming above the viewer. All I can say is that I was completely unaware that the new covers were on their way and any resemblance is purely coincidental (well apart from the fact I've always wanted to be able to paint like David Wyatt). You can view and download the Wyatt covers here. David's results were also vastly superior to mine as it happens so probably no more fully rendered Mortal Engines mock ups from me.

It's still an immensely visual series of books however so don't be surprised if you find a few sketches of vehicles and characters here in the future which are inspired by the novels.

Skulduggery Pleasant - The Singeing Deadtective

2010-03-05T12:36:00.006Z

My take on the first of Derek Landy's horror, comedy, mystery children's books. Those uninitiated in the world of the titular undead wizard detective should take a look at the series' site. Here you can find out about the characters, read extracts, listen to a Q&A with the authour and also get a look at the original cool cover art by Tom Percival.

Below is my original Photoshop illustration (sans 'retro' fonts, creases and greases) and below that the original Casablanca poster I stole the whole layout off. Whats good for George Clooney is good for me .

Thanks to Carrie for her help with the retro type!

The Dark Knight Revealed

2010-03-02T11:18:00.015Z

Commissioner Gordon's Office, Night. Batman appears out of the shadows

The vigilante and the Police hatch a plan to tackle the threat of the Joker.

Gordon looks up. Batman has vanished.

There's a clumsy bang from underneath the table.

GORDON: What are you... what are you doing under the table?

BATMAN: (embarrassed) I umm . . I was going to wait for you to leave first, and then I was going to leave.

Gordon and the Police Officer look on as ...

The Dark Knight awkwardly fumbles around...

bumping his head several times and clattering into chairs as he crawls out from under the table.

He reaches the door and fumbles with the door knob.
GORDON: You have to turn the lock-

Batman opens the door and makes a clumsy exit, catching his cape in the door the first time.
GORDON: Let's just recruit more policemen.

No, not storyboards for the much anticipated sequel to The Dark Knight but some key frames accompanying a recent pitch to Funny or Die UK. I'd like to take credit for the idea but I just worked the pencil. The people who should take the credit for a great Dark Knight parody are those young writer/actor/comedy types Chris Hayward and Nat Saunders. Unfortunately they weren't able to take the credit either as FOD passed on this particular script having found something similar had just beaten them to it on this bit of the interweb. I'm sure you'll agree that Chris would have looked much better in that cowl (his rubber fetish being the only reason he came up with the sketch really!)

You can view some of Chris and Nat's sketches that did make it to FOD here. Also watch out for their epic FOD exclusive The Photocopier.

Tintin fan art

2010-02-25T10:53:00.013Z

This is quite an old piece now (though not as as old as the fake patina would suggest). I first got the idea when Jackson and Spielberg announced they would be doing a Tintin movie - so some time in late 2007. I think everyone assumed it would be a live action film back then (turns out its going to be motion capture - presumably along the lines of Beowulf or Christmas Carol), so it got me thinking about what a realistic rendering of Herge's characters might look like. At the same time I was immersed in a lot of 1930s Pulp covers, and as Tintin was another product of that decade I thought a combination of the two might work.

I chose 'The Blue Lotus' as the subject partly because it was the only Tintin book I had to hand and also I'd wanted to draw a chinese dragon for a while and this story with its Shanghai setting gave me an excuse to do just that (so a green smoke dragon doesn't feature in the story, but since when has story detail meant anything to cover artists?).

I'm sure the final result is an abomination in the eyes of true Tintin fans, and having completed the work I have to say that the character should probably only be portrayed in the pen and ink style of his creator, or at least have two black dots instead of eyeballs - its what makes him Tintin I think.

Below are three steps to the finished version. The original pencil sketch (yes with real world pencils and paper). The scanned pencils taken into photoshop on a multiply layer with flat colour on a layer beneath (maybe better than the finished piece). And finally the fully rendered version done in Painter, prior to having type and digital dirt flung at it.

Vote LEIGHT or Goldilocks gets it!

2010-02-21T20:03:00.014Z

I've been roused from my blogging slumber to ask any kind readers who might be out there to visit my entry (see above) for Don't Panic's 'Left Hand of God' competition and consider casting a vote my way. Yes this is nothing but shameless self promotion.

'Don't Panic' (the free arts and culture publication) is running the competition based around the release of the Penguin novel The Left Hand of God. It asks for an artistic representation of the lead character of Thomas Cale based on three excerpts from the book. The winner gets to see their design printed on the Don't Panic poster and the chance to have their work featured in association with Penguin's promotion of the LHOG paperback.

I'm not holding out too much hope for grabbing any prizes here but as its decided by the public's vote I'm just hoping not to get too embarrassed by a big fat 'nil pois'

You can find my entry and take pity on it here (you'll have to register at the top right of the page in order to vote. Voting ends 5th of March). All other entries and the novel's three excerpts can be viewed here.

Below are the initial sketches for my piece based on excerpt 2 - yeah the violent one... with knives.

The Enemy

2009-08-29T11:19:00.010+01:00

Today sees the UK launch of Charlie Higson's horror adventure book 'The Enemy'. Set in a near future where a plague has turned all those over the age of 14 into flesh-eating zombies, it follows a gang of kids fighting to survive on the streets of London.

The cover of the advance copies had the tag line 'You thought they would always protect you... You were wrong'. I thought it would be interesting to try and come up with a way of illustrating this line. It led to the fairly grim visual joke above. Below are some sketches for the possible applications for such an image, an animated web banner perhaps or some form of fold out book cover or hologram cover.

The book holds passages of more grisly detail than the image above, but somehow when you visualise something like this it seems more shocking and tasteless. I did'nt really have enough enthusiasm for the image to create more than a rough colour sketch. I had a lot more enthusiasm for the book itself which is a pretty unrelenting page turner that pulls no punches despite its intended young readership.

V for Vendetta fan art

2009-08-25T10:35:00.008+01:00

My tribute painting to Alan Moore and David Lloyd's brilliant V for Vendetta. The finished piece above and a detail from the same, below.

I reread the graphic novel last year and was surprised by how much the main character seemed to have in common with 30s Pulp heroes such as The Shadow or The Spider ( I had been looking fairly closely at 30s pulp adventures for a number of other projects at the time, so this should have been no surprise).

At the back of this particular edition there was an essay by Alan Moore detailing the origin of the project. I was genuinely surprised to find my intuition was right and that the genesis of V rested in a brief from Dez Skinn to David Lloyd to 'create a new thirties mystery strip'. Moore was brought on board as writer, seeing the project as 'a new way of approaching the thirties pulp adventure strip'.

With Lloyd unhappy at the thought of the hours of research needed to visualise a realistic 30s setting they eventually placed their story in the near future rather than the near past, where they reasoned they could "create the same sense of mingled exoticism and familiarity".

All this set me thinking of a V for Vendetta image that would bring its Pulp heritage to the fore. I was thinking of the moody Shadow covers by George Rozen, but in terms of composition I had a comic book cover in mind which showed a masked avenger type vaulting over a city scape. I couldn't find a copy of the image while I was working on my V painting but eventually I came across a copy online and turns out it was Green Giant comis no.1 (below). Must have seen this in a Super Heroes Encyclopedia I had when I was a kid.

I found plenty of other inspiration from the Pulps of the thirties. There were a few Shadow/Spider elements I wanted to work in to the design.

The Shadow's liking for leaping fitted pretty well with my original vaulting Green Giant idea -

The motif of a gigantic version of the main character looming over or dominating in some way a piece of architecture or cityscape (shades of the Green Giant again) -

The hero swinging into action with a girl on his arm. The Shadow didn't seem to get the girl too often (poor old Shadow), but The Spider did, as it seems did every other Pulp hero. I really wanted to get the character of Evey into this image as well so really I needed something like this -

Below is my initial very rough sketch after collecting my references. It may need some interpretation - thats a gigantic version of V with Evey on his arm swinging above an exploding Houses of Parliament and kicking over the tower of Big Ben.

I got some more reference material together from photos of Parliament and from some photographs of myself in embarrassing poses and mixed them together in Photoshop.

From the colour composition (above) I worked on a more detailed pencil sketch (below).

This was scanned into my Mac and taken into Photoshop and Painter, and beaten with various digital brushes until it looked like the image at the top of this post. Somewhere along the way Big Ben escaped the wrath of V's boot but still got blown to bits anyway.

Reinventing the eel

2009-08-24T18:41:00.008+01:00

Pastiche of 30s Adventure pulp covers, featuring your typical 'boy's own' style hero in a battle beneath the waves.

Below, the original digital painting sans period style type and 'aged' layer.

The original pencil sketch before being scanned and daubed with pixels.

And here's how we got from one state of affairs to the other -

Below the many 'inspirations' for the image:

The Boys adventure covers -

Pulp hero Doc Savage's penchant for underwater adventure -

The ubiquitous merman of days gone by -

and the slightly later trend of men's adventure magazine covers depicting man vs nature - exemplified by the infamous and inexplicable "weasels ripped my flesh" cover.

FXposed

2009-07-28T11:02:00.005+01:00

The nice people at ImagineFX magazine have printed some of my work (and some of my words) in the FXpose section of their September issue #47. Its out from today in your newsagents. Look out for the Faerie adorned cover by Bente Schlick above.

It's live... its live!

2009-07-23T22:33:00.007+01:00

Been away from the Blogosphere for a while as I've been concentrating on creating a new version of my website. Check out the site at www.leightonjohns.co.uk We'd welcome any feedback on the new look.

Spock

2009-05-05T07:30:00.002+01:00

All things Star Trek reign this week - so here's my version of a much loved Vulcan, done while testing some brushes in Painter on Sunday.

Final Witches cover

2009-04-09T07:18:00.005+01:00

The final version of this (promise) - with words and letters and everything. In the strange and frightening alternate universe in which this version of the book was published someone gave me the chance to illustrate it apparently.

More Dahl Daubings

2009-04-08T21:54:00.004+01:00

My grandmother was tremendously old and wrinkled, with a massive wide body which was smothered in grey lace [...] My grandmother was the only grandmother I ever met who smoked cigars.
Roald Dahl, The Witches

"Birgit Svenson [...] One day she started growing feathers all over her body. Within a month, she had turned into a large white chicken. Her parents kept her for years in a pen in the garden. She even laid eggs."
Roald Dahl, The Witches

"...down in the kitchen the cook once found a baby crocodile swimming in his saucepan of soup."
Roald Dahl, The Witches

More Witches based scribbling. I'd intended to do some illustrations for the back of the mock book cover. I wanted three portraits in circular windows, along the lines of what you used to get on EC comics covers, a sort of preview of what lay within... 'terrifying transformations'... 'revolting recipes'... 'Ghoul-hunting Grannies'. It turned out they looked quite cramped on the back of the cover, but here they are anyway sans their EC style portholes.

The Witches

2009-04-01T19:48:00.007+01:00

And here (barring the temptation to tweak some more) is the finished illustration. Below is how we got here. Had to abandon the weird Village of the Damned eye effect as I couldn't work out if it was obscuring too much of the face/mask - maybe I should have been braver and stuck to my original idea. Ended up painting in some more obvious lightning bolt type things anyway, which I think work ok and which luckily I enjoy painting.

The Pulping of Roald Dahl

2009-03-24T10:21:00.009Z

This is a little bit of an explanation of what I was doing during the six months last year when I didn't post anything . I'd been wanting to do a portfolio of children's book covers for a while, I'd already made a start with the first two books of Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy. I intended to start work on the third cover but felt I wanted to ring the changes a little by working on something by a different author. So in the name of research I got into reading children's books again, looking at what was out there in the 8 - 12 age range. I took in a few new titles and went back to some classics.

One of the authors I re-read was Roald Dahl. I didn't really think his books would be ideal to work with because visually they are so closely linked with the style of Quentin Blake. Going back to his books though I was suprised at just how weirdly twisted they seemed. It was as lurid and frequently grotesque as anything you'd find in the pulp fiction of the 1930s and 40s, as if Robert Bloch, Ray Bradburry or L. Ron Hubbard had been asked to write for kids.

Dahl gave us the hunted turned hunters in the form of family of rifle brandishing ducks in The Magic Finger, a man eating Rhinoceros and a gigantic floating peach looming above the big apple's skyline in James and the Giant Peach a child scientist experimenting on his granny with a Food of the Gods style potion in Georges's Marvellous Medicine, and in The Witches we had the unforgettable scene of a beautiful young woman tearing off her own face to reveal a hideous visage "all cankered and worm-eaten". Classic pulp artists like Rafael de Soto and George Rozen would have had a field day with this stuff. This was the lightbulb going on moment, when I realised which cover I wanted to work on next and how to approach it. I wanted to take Dahl's books and redesign their covers in a retro pulp style. The look itself would be so far from Blake's that I thought it might at least make an interesting alternative.

My first choice was perhaps the most obvious. The unmasking of the Grand High Witch from the Witches was just crying out to be illustrated with all its lurid details. The point about the face coming off as a complete mask and half covering the real face reminded me of a few different Pulp covers from the classic era ( a couple illustrated below) - it just seems a very pulp like device. So maybe this would help suggest the hideousness of the face but also help obscure the details.

I also needed to do something special with her eyes. Dahl's narrator mentions how he feels 'mesmerised' by the witch and that 'there was a look of serpents in those eyes of her'. A little later he describes how:

"...a stream of sparks that looked like tiny white-hot metal-filings came shooting out of The Grand High Witch's eyes and flew straight towards the one who had dared to speak. I saw the sparks striking against her and burrowing into her and she screamed a horrible howling scream and a puff of smoke rose up around her. A smell of burning meat filled the room."

I thought of the Poster for the 1960 version of Village of the Damned, where the mesmerizing stare of the alien children is represented with a border of erratically drawn lines radiating from the eyes. I thought this might work as the witch's sinister fiery stare.

I did some more research to get the look of the Grand High Witch right before drawing. I was working from reference of everything from Bettie Page to Ray Harryhausen's version of Medusa from Clash of the Titans (1981)

As I started working on some black and white compositions in photoshop and painter it became clear I needed another element to let people in on the joke, to let them know it was a kids book. So I decided if we could get the narrator in there after he's been turned into a mouse that would help. Maybe having him scampering out of a pile of childrens clothes just post transformation with a look of terror on his little furry face might let people in on the fact he's no ordinary rodent.

When I was happy with the composition I laid down another layer, did a basic tracing, to map out where all the separate elements were and then printed this out as a guide for the finished pencil drawing above.

Winning Watchmen Storyboards

2009-02-25T18:58:00.020Z

A mammoth post this time, as expected by Andy Bent, the instigator of all this...

With the impending release of the film adaptation of Watchmen on March 6th, The Guardian website ran a Watchmen based storyboard competition. Participants were asked to storyboard the following page of the film's screenplay chosen by the film's director Zack Snyder.

The top prize was two tickets to the Watchmen movie world premiere on Feb 23rd, the chance to meet Snyder for a short Q&A session and accommodation for two in a top London hotel. As the top five entries would be looked at by the film's director and the overall winner chosen by him, it meant that even the runners up might get their work before the eyes of one of Hollywood's hottest talents.

Well I love Moore and Gibbons original Graphic Novel and I've had some success in previous storyboard competitions so why not try? The only problem was I just had a day to get this done. After a fourteen hour storyboarding marathon I finally had something to submit - something pretty rough I thought, but that might at least have a chance at one of the runner up prizes. Here they are - (click on each set of boards for a closer look).

I didn't hear anything on Thursday, the day the winner and runners up were to be contacted, so I thought 'that's that' and just got on with everything else I was supposed to be working on.

Then Sunday night I got a call from Paramount Pictures telling me that because of his hectic schedule Zack Snyder hadn't had a chance to look at the finalists until the weekend. When he did get a chance he had chosen me. According to The Guardian my 'professional looking storyboard caught the eye of [the] Watchmen director '. That sounds pretty good doesn't it? What I suppose 'professional looking' might mean is that it looked like the work of someone who's been given an impossibly short deadline and has produced something just about the right side of legible whilst still allowing himelf time to eat. Whatever the reason, I was going to the Premiere!

By Monday afternoon I and four other competition winners from around the world were meeting the man himself in a plush Soho hotel suite. Despite having a punishing schedule of media interviews and other promotional work Snyder seemed laid back and happy to give half an hour of his time over to chatting with us. He took another look at our storyboards whilst we quizzed him on his experience making the film.

He spoke amongst other things about his own work on storyboading the script, his reasons for doing this himself and not relying on a storyboard artist, his decision to give Ozymandias' costume nipples and why allowing Nite owl to wear lycra would have ruined the movie (maybe I should have taken issue with this last point, after all Sandy Collora's 2003 fan film Batman: Dead End, released over a decade after Tim Burton ushered in the era of body-armoured superheros, had Batman wearing an almost Adam West style lycra suit, and everyone thought that looked great - Kevin Smith described it as 'possibly the truest Batman movie ever made' and Alex Ross said it was 'Batman the way I've always wanted to see him'. My God... I can't believe I just typed that, must have forgotten to take my geek medication.)

By 6pm we were being chauffeured to Leicester square and were soon walking up the... errr, yellow carpet.

Lucky me , just about to pass through the security gates to the 'yellow'
carpet.

After some official group photos it was on to our seats to await the film that had been deemed 'unfilmable' by its writer, taken over twenty years to produce and had eluded the likes of Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky and Paul Greengrass.

I'm not going to go into a full review of the film itself - there are plenty of those to be found online already - but I will say that it's certainly more faithful to the novel than anyone could have hoped or expected. That Snyder has managed to drag it kicking and screaming to the screen at all is a miracle but considering the source material relies so heavily on the attributes of it's particular medium, it seems doubtful that there could have been a better cinematic outing for it.

After the film we were lucky enough to get tickets to the exclusive cast and crew party on the 31st floor of London's Centre Point building where we rubbed shoulders with (or at least stumbled drunkenly into) stars of the film such as Billy Crudup, Carla Gugino and Jackie Earle Haley , as well as Watchmen co-creator Dave Gibbons. So, much star spotting was done and many free cocktails downed.

On leaving the party we didn't even have to worry about navigating our way home as the lovely people at Paramount had us booked into the luxurious St Martins Lane hotel with its crazy Philippe Starck designed lobby, all golden teeth stools and garden gnomes. A suitably surreal end to the evening

So that was our unlikely Watchmen adventure. Huge thanks must go to Zack Snyder for first of all making the film, then picking my work, and then giving us a chance to meet him. Thanks also to Yalin, Nina and everyone else at Paramount for looking after us and treating us so well, to Andy Bent for sending me the link to the competition and not entering and winning himself, and to Carrie for forcing me to take part and then being my beautiful date for the evening .

Now go watch the Watchmen.

Countryfile 2038

2009-02-19T12:57:00.008Z

A follow up to the last post. Some storyboards for a section of Chris and Nat's sketch imagining the BBC's Countryfile and iconic host John Craven as they might appear in a post-apocalyptic 2038.

I think this was originally pitched for the BBC's Peter Serafinowicz show, but it never made it to our screens sadly. At least this leaves the door open for Mr Craven to play his own future self... who else could keep us up to date with the problems posed by mutant pigs and nuclear badgers?

CRAVEN!

2009-02-17T07:21:00.003Z

The Pitch: "It's 'Mad Max' meets 'Countryfile'!"

Idea by Chris Hayward & Nat Saunders.
Visuals by me.
Storyboards to follow.

Robot Hearts

2009-02-14T10:39:00.004Z

Something vaguely Valentine's day related. These were some sketches I did a couple of years ago. The ideas came after hearing the name of the Brighton based band The Robot Heart. They're good, but in no way is their music represented by a mecha-style cardiovascular system such as those above. Find their brand of bittersweet alt pop here - http://www.myspace.com/therobotheart

Drippy Alien

2009-02-10T17:58:00.005Z

Another sketchbook piece, this time trying out some of Painter's watercolor brushes and Photoshop's wet media brushes. The subject for some reason was one of Giger's Xenomorphs.

Ruff sketch

2009-01-27T18:34:00.004Z

Just a little doodle of 'the bard' I found in my digital sketchbook archive. A ball point pen, scanner and photoshop were involved... no quills.

iballs

2009-01-22T21:34:00.003Z

They've given us the iBook, iPod, iPhone, iTunes and even iLife. What next from Apple Mac? Thanks to another sketch from Chris and Nat and storyboards by my good self we can proudly present... the iBall

The script was the only excuse I've come across to render the interior of a meat packing factory... everyone should try it at least once.

Law Enforcement

2009-01-20T10:02:00.003Z

"Who is Jude Law? Why's he in every movie I have seen for the last four years? He's in everything. Even in the movies he's not in, if you look in the credits he made cupcakes or something." So said Chris Rock in 2005. Clearing out my folders revealed he even turned up in my sketchbook at one point.

2008 however seemed to be a Lawless year (not one film appearance according to IMDB.com) so here he is for anyone who missed him. For everyone who didn't - bad news, with the recession biting hard he's sure to be touting for work soon even if its just some of his celebrity cupcake baking.

Crawling Man

2009-01-16T22:41:00.011Z

A follow up to the last post (Trying to avoid the fact that was almost six months ago!), more storyboards based on the same script by Chris Hayward and Nat Saunders.

Its a great comic take on the sort of Twilight Zone/Outer Limits TV anthology you don't see anymore. The previous post gave the boards for the typical unsettling title sequence you got with these anthologies, below are the boards for a scene from the main story.

Landlord Ron Bertrum is called into tenant Sam's flat to help out with an unusual household pest...

And now a tale...

2008-08-19T18:03:00.009+01:00

Hasn't been much evidence of storyboarding round here for a while so here's some done using good old fashioned pencil and paper. Its the opening sequence from a darkly comic script by the residents of wormhotel.

The Subtle Knife

2008-05-22T21:23:00.008+01:00

A stab at designing an alternative cover for the second instalment in Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy. Detail above, whole shebang below.

Coldylocks and the three 'brrrrr's

2008-05-22T20:32:00.005+01:00

" ... and this porridge was too cold"

The Frog of War

2008-05-21T06:58:00.003+01:00

Cosmic Reaper

2008-04-17T07:54:00.002+01:00

An image inspired by recent research from Belfast Professor Mike Baillie suggesting a link between the outbreak of the Black Death in the fourteenth century and the entry of comets into the earth's atmosphere.

Below is an earlier version with a different colour scheme (which seemed just too colourful to me), along with my initial idea sketches. All of the versions were based around this idea of the comet and its tail doubling as the scythe of the grim reaper.

Bad Moon Rising

2008-04-14T08:20:00.001+01:00

A recent image based on one of the most memorable passages from the SF novella - 'The Atrocity Archive' by Charles Stross. I originally caught most of the story when it was serialised in Spectrum SF about seven years ago, before Stross became a major novelist in the genre.

The story has recently been published in paperback along with another story, under the title 'The Atrocity Archive' so I finally got to finish reading it. Its partially set in an alternate universe where the Nazi's win WWII with the help of demonic forces and go on to produce a monument to der Fuhrer that makes Mount Rushmore look a bit lacklustre.

On first reading this passage it seemed like the sort of thing that might have inspired the cover of a 40s Pulp magazine. So I thought I might try producing this cover that never was. In hindsight perhaps I should have made more of the pulp style in the execution. Below are the steps that got me to the final image.

The Eagle has Landed

2008-03-28T16:36:00.005Z

The first of a few pieces I've been working on recently. This one is the sort of idea you get from reading alternative history SF but actually looks like some concept art for a live action depiction of Bugs and Daffy nemesis Marvin the Martian.

Next week - Elmer Fudd as played by Ed Harris

Armoured Bear: Widescreen edition

2008-03-13T07:07:00.005Z

Can't seem to stop tinkering with this image. Actually this landscape version (with added Northernlights and ominous arctic resarch centre) was finished pretty much straight after the portrait version I posted last autumn. I just felt my blog was getting a bit bear-centric at the time so held the image back. I've recently submitted it for consideration in Ballistic's Expose 6 book which is being published this year. As it may not make the final print of that I thought I'd let it roam free here. Oh - there's also a version with type and titles and barcodes and all that bookcoverish type stuff as my initial idea was to use it as a mock book cover project - which explains the vast areas of empty nothingness in the design.

Also trawling through internetland the other day I came across this Supergirl poster from 1984. I remember it being outside our local cinema when I was a kid and being quite impressed with it at the time. I haven't seen it again until now but looks like it might have had some influence - unlike the film itself.

Bald Boy

2008-03-06T06:59:00.004Z

Very quick bit of doodling in Painter using scratchboard tool and chunky oil pastel.

I'm Henery the Eighth I am (honest...and so is he)

2008-02-26T07:33:00.006Z

A couple of versions of the same idea based on a Time magazine article from last year. The article pointed out the recent interest Hollywood seems to have with the Tudors and the history defying casting decisions of the studios when it came to Henry VIII - what with neither Jonathan Rhys Meyers ('The Tudors') or Eric Bana ('The Other Boleyn Girl') being all that rotund or ginger.

Last of the Broken Tokyo Ghosthunters

2008-02-05T18:22:00.001Z

I forgot a few details regarding the storyboard competition in my last entry. First off you were only allowed to produce the illustrations using Corel Painter X (you could download a 30 day trial version), which was more than ok by me. The other condition was that the storyboards had to be based on one of three scripts by brilliant up and coming screenwriter Graham Thomas. Each screenplay tackled a different genre - film noir, science fiction, and, well something resembling Gilliamesque surrealism. One of the most difficult aspects of the competition was choosing which tale to tell - each had great things going on which were just crying out to be visualised.

I finally opted for the manga style sf script as its probably the genre I'm more familiar with. Below is the storyboarded opening scene of the script. If you want to find out how the whole thing turns out you can check out the script and the two alternatives at:
http://apps.corel.com/lp/emea/px/5157/index.html

Corel Storyboard Competition

2008-02-05T08:50:00.001Z

I think I can finally say this in some official way - somehow I've managed to win the Corel Painter Storyboard competition! The competition was announced via the corel website and Painter magazine way back in July last year. Entrants were lured with the chance of winning a Wacom Cintiq 21UX if you managed to snare first place.

Corel contacted me with the news that I'd won, but I didn't really believe it until I saw my boards in print in the current (Issue 13 Feb 2008) copy of the Corel Painter Mag. They've been very kind and given me a double page spread to show off the boards. There are so many images though that inevitably some of them are difficult to make out and its quite hard to follow - so I think I'll post some of them here for those who are interested. Below is a kind of 'trailer' for the main feature a few of the illustrations at a decent res to show you how they looked as I worked on them. I'll put the full boards up soon. You have been warned.

A Little Strange

2008-01-29T11:21:00.002Z

To boost my confidence after my disappointment at the way my Modern Fairytale competition entry turned out I thought I'd post something that turned out fairly well. Its my submission for the CG society 'Strange Behaviour' challenge. I've posted a link to the competition site previously but here' s the finished image.

It was inspired by two 'characters'. Firstly Steve Ditko and Stan Lee's magical superhero 'Doctor Strange'. For those not familiar with the 'Master of the Mystic Arts' below is Kevin Nowlan's fantastic rendering of the character and below that a comic cover that bears an eerie resemblance to my effort (I didn't come across this til after I'd painted mine, honest!).

The other 'character' behind the image is my 4 year old nephew. Like lots of kids he's obsessed with dressing up and roleplaying superhero's, usually Spiderman or Superman. Everyone's used to this but what if he had a thing for dressing as a slightly darker character like Dr Strange - someone looking a little spooky and linked to black magic, and astral projection. Wouldn't this be considered real 'Strange' behaviour? Especially if he managed to gain some of his powers...

Well it's not perfect by any means and didn't win anything but it did get some favourable comments at the CG society and the Painter magazine site. Maybe if I had retained the landscape approach I used in my initial sketch below this would have helped. The aghast parents just bursting into the bedroom on the left helps define the main character as a child in fancy dress (and not a moustached goblin as might be supposed) and the greater area given to the room would allow us to present it more clearly as a child's bedroom. Despite this I'm fairly happy with the result Maybe I'm too easily pleased.

Little Red Riding Hoody

2008-01-27T17:46:00.001Z

Finally finished my entry for the Dulwich picture gallery competition. It's not what it should be but what with the dealine and everything I didn't have enough time to teach myself how to paint properly. Oh well here it is...

"Nothing is written..."

2008-01-22T07:00:00.001Z

Many moons ago, movie magazine Empire ran a competition where you had to choose a Brit flick and convince them in 100 that this was the greatest example of celluloid mastery that Blighty ever produced. I chose David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, and then set about utterly failing to come up with anything coherent. The problem was words kept faling me and I kept wanting to storyboard the thing.

So I didn't get anywhere with the competition, but I did come away with the idea that it might be interesting to do a film review in a comic book format - which is something I hadn't seen before... and still haven't. Anyway here are the foundations to that lost project, some studies of Peter O'Toole in Bedouin attire using done with a bit of painter, a little bit of photoshop, and even some real live pencil!

What big eyes you have...

2008-01-21T07:27:00.001Z

Just a quick check on progress of my proposed Age of Enchantment entry. I've been concentrating on the Psycho/Red riding hood crossbreed. Goats were proving too problematic, maybe I'll get back to them when I have more time. I've just managed to work out this fairly clean version of the red riding hood composition. I think it works ok... so on to the colour.

Age of Enchantment

2008-01-13T15:22:00.001Z

Last weekend we visited the Age of Enchantment exhibition at the nearby Dulwich Picture Gallery (link above). The exhibition focused on the classic period of early twentieth century book illustration taking in the work of Beardsley, Housman, Rackham and Dulac. For me the highlights were getting to look at the original incredibly detailed ink works by Beardsley, and the beautiful use of colour work by Dulac.

The exhibition runs until the 17 February. There is also a competition linked to the exhibition. It asks you to create your own fairytale illustration in a modern setting. So suitably inspired I statrted work on a couple of concept. One is Little red riding hood with the wolf recast as a Norman Bates style cross dressing maniac. The other idea is 3 Billy-goats Gruff as an altercation between a motorist and a particularly belligerent toll booth operator. Closing date is Jan 28th so not sure if this is going to be finishable with other work on but here goes. WIP below.

Skullduggery

2008-01-09T18:29:00.000Z

After I moved heaven and earth not to jump on the Pirates/Skull themed bandwagon with my Painter X project, preferring to go in the direction of a certain Dr Jones - here, bringing us full circle, is the latest offering from the good Doctor himself and Mr Struzan.

You can almost hear uncle George - "The guy from TRANSFORMERS and a SKULL - the kids are gonna love it!"

Alternate endings

2008-01-08T18:12:00.001Z

Having worked on each element seperately, I had some problems when I brought them together - there was just too much going on in the composition. The submission date for the competition was looming however so I panicked and just ploughed on. I was also having some difficulty due to the enforced reliance on Painter. I couldn't seem to replicate the textures for the distressed and moss covered temple interior that I was using as a background. Its not that Painter couldn't do this, just that it took me longer to find out how while I was pining for my photoshop brushes. Eventually such problems along with a couple of other projects that had to take precedent meant that come the competition's closing date all I had was what you see below.

It was pretty close to being finished though so I continued to work on it. Now that it was no longer in competition I was free to take it into photoshop and to come up with a new design for the Painter X can.

I was fairly happy with the individual elements, the main character and the background, but the whole thing just seemed unfocused. I felt part of the problem was that I had started work with such a loose brief. I think It always helps if you can design for a product, I was never sure what this was supposed to be - a poster? a bookcover? I was thinking about this when I came across an A5 booklet, a guide to Painter X that came free with issue 15 of ImagineFX magazine. I thought it would be interesting to see if I could use my illustration as an alternate cover for this guide and see if the constraints this imposed would help with decision making on the composition. It meant sacrificing one of the booby-traps, flopping some of the other elements, changing a leg in one instance, and cobbling the background together again but I think over all its a stronger image.

So no win here but I managed to learn quite a bit from the process which is fitting when you consider that Indiana Jones never gets to hold on to the treasure in the end either. Now watch this space for the sequels.

The Main Man

2008-01-07T07:04:00.001Z

For the main illustration, where our hero finally finds the treasure I wanted something very like the shots used for such scenes in the Indy films. Usually this meant a low angle shot of the hero, hands outstretched ready to grasp at the prize, with his obsessed face illuminated by an unearthly glow eminating from said prize (see below)

I wanted the character to retain the adventurer's garb with just the slightest hint of him being an artist/illustrator. He also had to be generically heroic looking - not Harrison Ford. This initial sketch was done using Painter's Square Chalk.

I went on to clean up this sketch, added a sepia background (close to what I had prepared for the 'map' background) and started working with values.

Again I almost like this unfinished version more than what I ended up with. It reminded me of Western posters of the 70s for films like 'High Plains Drifter' and 'The Missouri Breaks'. Once more though this had to be more about exploring what Painter could do so I kept to the script and started to integrate the character into the existing composition.

Perils, pitfalls, and pencils

2008-01-04T07:08:00.001Z

Having worked out that I was going to illustrate sections along the route drawn on the map I just had to work out what would be happening along this route.

Indiana Jones' path to his treasure was always beset by booby traps or plagued by our phobias - snakes, insects, rats. But this wasn't Indiana Jones following this map. This treasure was a futuristic art tool combining the properties of all existing traditional artist materials in all possible colours and hues - but with the eerie ability for its paints and inks to never run dry and its pencils and chalks to never blunt. This was not a treasure to be desired by an archaeologist, but the dream of a struggling artist. It stood to reason then that the perils faced by our artist explorer should be the dangers and fears of an artist. So I took the awkwardness and nuisances sometimes experienced when working with traditional media (the problems with a blocked and sputtering airbrush say, leaky or drying pens, or the pecil that snaps every time you sharpen it) and melded them with the Indy booby trap convention to create...

I've placed the original cleaned up line drawings here first ( all done on Painter X, I can assure you - X my heart) as I quite liked the feel of them, I was almost persuading myself to ink them cleanly to give a black and white comic book effect, but that would hardly have shown off what Painter could do - so below are the gaudy colour versions -

Looking at traditional art tools trying to see the possibilities for spears, spikes and snakes in their form, I began to see other things as well - faces in the shape of sharpeners and inkwells - they reminded me of the carvings of the Mayans and Aztecs and I started to imagine the resting place of this 'Paintpot of the Gods' as the Temple of an Ancient South American civilization dedicated to the worship of art. So into that Temple we'll venture dear reader in our next (yaaaawwwn) enthralling instalment.

Painter X marks the spot...

2008-01-03T07:30:00.000Z

Happy New Year one and all. My obvious New Year's resolution should be to keep this blog in a more up to date fashion, but first of all I'm going to have to make it through the things I intended to post last year. So for a while its going to be a bit of a review of work done in 2007 (and in a couple of instances even earlier).

Back in February Imagine publishing's Corel Painter Magazine was launched to coincide with the release of Corel Painter X. The Premiere issue included a competition which gave you a chance to win a copy of the software in limited edition paint can packaging. All you had to do was use a trial version of Painter X to produce a piece of artwork which included the Painter X can somewhere in the composition.

I wanted the software, I liked the idea of having to work the product into the design, all I needed now was an idea. Here's how my simplistic mind kicked into action. The X of Painter X was what I focused on - 50s and 60s horror films that played on their X rating sprang to mind - "X the unknown", "The Quatermass Xperiment" etc - maybe a schlocky 50s style movie poster could have been the way to go, with something sinister creeping from the Painter X can. This probably wasn't what Corel would want their product to be associated with so I moved on. More recent X type imagery in the pop consciousness include "The X files" again probably not a wholly positive association in terms of the product.

A more upbeat path may have been The X men avenue - Painter X as a mutated superhero version of your everyday paint can. 2007 however was the year of the Pirate, they seemed to be everywhere- we'd just had our second instalment of the Pirate of the Carribean trilogy, and number three was heading our way in the summer, the skull and crossbones were everywhere from children's bookcovers to T-shirsts and leggings. Pirates have treasure maps - treasure is marked on maps with an X - Painter X as sought after treasure definitely had possibilities.

I liked the idea of perhaps involving a treasure map as part of the artwork. Drew Struzan had used Treasure maps as backdrops for a number of his movie posters of the years including, Cutthroat island, Hook and The Muppets' Treasure Island and I thought these might serve as inspiration

Struzan is probably better known as the artist behind the Indiana Jones movie posters and the covers for the spin-off novels. Surprisingly he never used his treasure map trick for these films but it certainly would have been appropriate. I was a little worried about jumping on the Pirate bandwagon so a Saturday Matinee treasure hunter style character gave me another interesting option.

Another aspect of Struzan's work that I felt would help with the treasure map idea is the way that a lot of his posters are a collage of scenes or set peices from the films. I was interested in using the treasure map as almost a peice of sequential art with a different scene marking important stopping points on the map. I thought the little triangular and circular windows that he 's used on many of his book covers could work as windows onto the treasure hunters journey.

At the end of the map's trail where X marks the spot I intended to have a larger image focusing on the treasure hunter as he finds the fabled Painter X can.

One thing that I wanted to avoid however was a complete steal of Struzan's style, which can at times be almost photographic in its realism. I was looking for a more pulpy comic book feel. Something that inspired and legitamized this approach was the work done by legendary comic book artist Jim Steranko in the concept art for the original Indy film "Raiders of the lost Ark".

As far as I can tell Steranko's artwork seemed to be responsible for the iconic look of the character, Fedora, Leather jacket, bullwhip etc so in a way I was going back to the original concept in reverting to this pulp cover style ( I also felt I had a better chance of pulling the thing off this way.)

So with my trial version of Painter X downloaded, my inspirational material in one hand and my whip (well wacom stylus actually) in the other I set off into perils unknown to seek fortune and glory... And in true serial fashion you'll have to wait till next time to find out what happens next.

To be continued...

2000 years E.C

2007-12-24T07:30:00.001Z

At Halloween I posted some work involving snow and polar bears and heavenly lights, so here on Chritmas Eve, is what I probably should have posted back then - just to play with your mind.

This work is quite old and a little crude but I've displayed it elsewhere with no explanation as to its origins so I thought it was time to explain its development. Back in 2004 a friend of a friend of someone I met briefly some time ago was setting up a new horror based mag and was looking for people to submit articles and illustrations. This was the year of Mel Gibson's blood spattered easter offering 'The Passion of the Christ' and I thought I'd try my hand at an article examining Mel's nods to the Horror genre (the film references everything from 'The Exorcist', to 'It's Alive' and Last house on the Left) and questioning whether this might be the start of a new cinematic sub-genre - Biblical Horror!

The article would offer (in a fairly flippant way to be honest) suggestions of stories from the Good Book that might make for great horror situations - King Solomon (In legend commanded demons to do his bidding with the aid of a magic ring), The raising of Lazarus (Jesus as Zombie-maker), The death of Jezebel (Thrown from a window, trampled under foot and torn apart by dogs), The Witch of Endor (Summoned the prophet Samuel from beyond the grave - but luckily was not infested by Ewoks), Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon (World's first Werewolf - apparently) and James, brother of Jesus (fared no better than his more famous sibling, ended up thrown from the pinnacle of the Temple, survived only to be stoned and then beaten to death with a staff).

Moses - hero of the Old Testament seemed like a good egg when played by Chuck Heston, modern re-readings of the Old Testament however have cast him in a more merky light - A murderer on the run, he later comes to prominence as a kind of proto-terrorist - inflicting biological warfare on Egypt (the 10 plagues), rules his people with an iron fist and then takes part in acts of genocide to secure the promised land. Apart from this, the descriptions of his appearnace and trappings have something of the gothic about them. Armed with a staff that transformed into a serpent, his head sporting a set of horns according to some translations, an eerie glow according to others; his appearance so terrified his people that he spent the latter part of his life with his face veiled like so many super villains from The Phantom of the Opera, through Doctor Doom to Darth Vader. Every great masked madman needs his secret weapon, Blofeld's Diamond laser from Diamonds are forever, Vader's planet searing Death Star... Moses has his own Death Ray in the form of The Ark of the Covenant, the gilded box that zaps the unrighteous to smouldering piles of ash, dries up rivers and brings plague to his enemies.

Here I thought was the perfect representative of Biblical character as horror star. So with the writing of the article going nowhere fast I set about sketching the darkside version of the great lawgiver in suitably pulpy style, a hooded figure with his secret weapons in his moutaintop hideout.

There was no real plan for the ilustration at this time, but I just kept going with it, as it meant I didn't feel like I had to tackle the more problematic writing duty. I also strted sketching some concepts for the other potential Bible characters - Nebuchadnezzar, The Witch of Endor and Solomon.

By this point the pulp style and the horror subject had started me thinking of the EC horror comics of the 50s. They had the convention of showing a main cover image along with three smaller portraits of characters appearing within the comic. I thought this could allow me to illustrate a number of the characters I intended to mention in the text. Both the EC Horror comics and the Biblical epics such as Quo Vadis (1951) and The Ten Commandments (1956) were of the same era, it seemed fun and in some ways perversely appropriate to create a hybrid of the two. I had already established a painted pulp style look to the original Moses illustration so I continued this with the smaller character portraits rather than following slavishly the the flat colour and line style of the EC covers.

The fact that I had drawn the Moses composition before working out the EC cover concept sort of hobbled the whole main image really. It all seemed a little too unfocused and I had to end up covering my beloved background volcano with text. I was fairly confident that I could fix all this but felt I should actually get on and write the damn article.

Soon after this however it became clear that for one reason or another the magazine would not be going to press, not anytime soon at least, and so there was nothing compelling me to finish the article or go back and correct the problems with the illustration. Below however through the miracles of modern computing is what the article might have looked like if I'd bothered to finish it and had the magazine actually made it to production. As far as I know the Magazine is still eaiting to rise from it's creative grave.

Something else that never came to pass was the arrival of the Biblical-Horror genre. All we got as a follow up to Mel's blood soaked Easter parade was Catherine Hardwicke's bland The Nativity Story (we can only guess at what Mel would have made of the Massacre of the innocents!), though there did seem to be a slew of Passion inspired torture horror - Hostel, Saw, Wolf Creek,and Gibson's own Apocalypto, along with remakes of the very horror films which seemed to have informed The Passion - The Omen, The Hills Have Eyes, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - I'm sure Mr Gibson must be very proud.

So on that rambling note have a very Merry Christmas, and don't have nightmares.

God in the McDetail

2007-11-12T08:26:00.001Z

Here's something that's taken me quite a while to complete. In the December 2000 issue of Interzone magazine there was a short story called "Rude Elves and Dread Norse Reindeer" by Dominic Green. The story told of the adventures of a group of figments of the collective unconscious (including Santa, a Man in Black, Odin, Uncle Sam, and God) who are joined by a typical all American hick.

Shortly after reading this I started work on a painting based on part of the story. One incident has Santa (who's sleigh has recently been shot down by an F-15) strolling into a McDonalds with his new friend Norman only to find themselves being served by... God! I did an initial sketch and started working on it in Acrylics. At some point I got dissatisfied with the results and shelved it until I could work out what was going wrong. Almost seven years later I finally went back and finished it digitally. I'm not sure if it was worth the wait but here are the two versions anyway.

Strange Behaviour

2007-11-02T07:07:00.001Z

Just a link (Click on 'Strange Behaviour' above) to the recent Challenge I've entered at CG Society. The deadline for the competition has been extended to 12th Nov - so any suggestions anyone has for improvements I could make before then would be welcome. Thanks.

Army of Bears

2007-10-31T07:09:00.001Z

As a follow up to yesterday's post here are some of the sketches I did for my initial Armoured Bear illustration a couple of years ago. These were done very quickly as I remember, I was just trying to work out how the whole armoured plating thing would work on a polar bear. I was looking at a lot of books on armour worn by horses in battle, but looking at it now it seems more influenced by the gear worn by the Uruk-Hai and Attack Trolls from Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films.

I've just realised its Halloween and I should probably have posted something with more of an appropriate theme. Well there's always next year, and anyway an armoured bear would scare the hell out of me if it came trick-or-treating. I'll post something scarey soon. Probably on Christmas Eve.

Happy Halloween

Armoured Bear

2007-10-30T11:19:00.001Z

This is a recent reworking of an illustration I did a couple of years ago. The first attempt can still be seen on my website. Its based on characters from Phillip Pullman's Northern Lights novel (The Golden Compass - US). I was reminded of it recently with the current hype surrounding the forthcoming film version. I saw the film poster in our local cinema featuring Lyra and Iorek Byrnison the armoured bear. I have to say I still sort of prefer my design for the armour (even if you might mistake my bear for a large angry badger) but I suppose we'll have to wait for the film's release in December to judge what it looks like in action.

Space Mural

2007-09-22T12:14:00.001+01:00

Some photos here of the mural we finished off last week in our local hospital's Accident and Emergency wing. There was a very small window of opportunity for us to get in there and do the work as its an area of the hospital that is in high demand and there was already refurbishment work being caried out.
The 3m x 3m ceiling area to be painted was specifically designated as a child's treatment cubicle and staff wanted something bright on the ceiling to help distract 5 to 10 year olds from whatever unpleasantness they may be undergoing. With this in mind I looked at a lot of the design techniques used by animators and cartoonists in the 50s - people like Mary Blair, Tom Oreb and even Saul Bass. A great Source of inspiration was Amid Amidi's book 'Cartoon Modern : Style and Design in Fifties Animation'. I thought the strong graphic style and bright colours of the period would lend themselves to quick application with stencils. It worked too, though It would have been impossible without the help of designer extraordinaire Carrie Edwards, sharing the work at the top of that scaffholding.
So despite working in a completely alien style and having to deal with real paint and all its associated messiness, I was fairly pleased with the end result. I only hope the poor kids who have to sit underneath it don't feel like its adding to their woes. I also have to thank Steve and Cat Tait for bringing the project to my attention in the first place - Cheers.

J. Jonah Vulture

2007-09-21T07:01:00.001+01:00

A couple of recent digital doodles, well just one actually, the second is the same sketch with a colour layer. Weirdly they both reminded me of different Spiderman characters, the original - J. Jonah Jameson (albeit after losing his crew cut), the colour version - The Vulture. Amazing that it only takes some irresponsible use of RGB to turn you from an office bully to full blown costume wearing villain.

Freeing the Beard

2007-09-18T15:23:00.001+01:00

I'm going to be posting mainly digital sketches and paintings that I've been working on. Hopefully most of the work will be quite recent and will prompt me to keep churning stuff out on a regular basis but there's also quite a bit of older sketchy stuff which has never quite made it to my website. Today for example I thought I should introduce you to 'the beard'. He's a little doodle I did with a ballpoint pen few years ago. I couldn't bring myself to throw him away so I scanned him into my Mac and ever since hes been helping me out with my digital work. I test out untried brushes from Photoshop and Painter on him rather than ruining whatever I'm working on. He's been through a lot - I think he deserves his 15 minutes.