THUNDERBOLTS: THE GREAT ESCAPE TPB OUT NOW


Had a pleasant surprise today when I saw my own work on the shelves gawking back at me. 'The Great Escape', the most recent collection of my run with Jeff Parker and Kev Walker, is out now. It collects my 'Point One' issue, where the Tbolts go to Ireland! Also, my 'Ripper Tour' is collected too. I ugre you all to check it out.

While I'm at it, you might notice that I have a 'Bibliography' sidebar to the right, where I have links to Amazon for all my collected works to date if you're interested in picking them up. Recently added my Sweeney Todd graphic novel too.

Dec.

SWEENEY TODD COVER



Got word from Classical Comics last week; Sweeney Todd is now fully coloured! All the book needed was a cover, so here it is.

Glad I waited 'til the end to do this cover; parts of the book are 3(!?!) years old so I'm glad that I could present the finished book with the most recent work possible.

Dec.

ASYLUM












Another panel from Sweeney Todd, which i'm slowly chipping away at.

Dec.

MORE SWEENEY TODD










Yikes! I've really been slacking at the blogging of late. Sorry. My bad. Been busy, etc.

Here's a panel from the newest set of Sweeney Todd pages.

Dec.

SWEENEY TODD PANELS
















Some of you may remember I've been working on a Sweeney Todd graphic novel adaptation for quite a while. Well, I've made some headway on the book in the last couple of weeks. About bloody time. Here's some panels from a recent page.

Dec.

SWEENEY TODD PAGE 80
























Here's a recent page from the Sweeney Todd graphic novel i'm drawing. I posted the pencils of a panel from this page a couple of weeks ago. Have a peek. In the pencilled panel i had blackened out his right eye, but when i inked it, it looked like he had a hole in his head so i went in and highlighted his eyelid with some white ink.

Dec.

TODD CLOSE UP [PENCILS]















Whoops! Nearly forgot to post today... i get confused which day i need to post as when i'm posting every second day, the actual day changes each week.

Here's a close up of a new panel from Sweeney Todd. The script asked for him to look really sinister and i reckon i managed to achieve that. Really looking forward to inking this panel, actually.

Dec.

SWEENEY TODD PAGE 67 INKS
























Gah! Blog got spammed yesterday; every single post on this blog was spammified, if that's a word .....which it's not. All 370-something of them were spammed. Twice. Spent hours deleting all of it, but there's still 400 or so comments to delete. Blurg.

Anyway, i showed a hi-res scan of a panel form this page a week or so ago. Here's the whole finished page.

Dec.

PANEL SCAN
























I have this great 'Art of Hellboy' book which obviously, has lots of Mignola goodness in it. One of my favourite parts of the book however, isn't the (lovely) Hellboy water-colours he has, but the scans of his black and white pages. What's great about them, is that they're not cleaned up or anything; you can see the different levels of ink he used, the heaviness of the ink lines, etc. it's the next best thing to looking at the actual page. So, here's a reasonably big scan of a section of a recent Sweeney Todd page that i haven't altered. If you look, you can pick out parts that were done with dip-pen nib, brush pen, inky fingerprints, actual indian ink and various splatter effects.

I'll post the whole cleaned-up page in a few days.

Dec.

SWEENEY TODD PAGE 65; LAYOUTS TO INKS

Well, it seems no one objects to seeing layouts so i thought i'd show a page from Sweeney Todd, but show it from original layout to finished inks. Below you can see the layout for page 65. I sent it to my editor at Classical Comics for approval. Sometimes the layout needs to be tweaked, like if i haven't left enough room for speech bubbles, etc. It happens from time to time; but not often.
























There were no real problems with the layout page, aside from how the character in panel 5 had her finger to her lips. The script instructed her to do so in a certain way, with the palm placed flat facing her face, rather than placed on its side. However, my editor asked me to ove her finger to the centre more, rather than at the side of her mouth. Other than that, i could go straight to pencils.
























Long-term readers are probably aware of my work-process, but just in case, i blow up my layout page and lightbox it onto the full-size artboard. That way i can try to keep some essence of the spontaneity that the original sketch had. By keeping the composition as close as possible to the layout, i think the end page ends up a bit more engaging. I sent the pencils to my editor, but there was an issue with the last couple of panels. My editor was concerned that the character in panel 5 was silent (mouth closed, finger to lips) yet was speaking, so asked me to make the final panel bigger so the speech bubble could be placed there instead.
























While inking, i wasn't 100% happy with the arm of the character on the left of panel 4, so changed it slightly. I was also wary of the page looking dull as it is essentially a talking scene. I had used a non-standard layout to make the page more visually engaging, but i also tried to do that in the inks too by breaking up some 'dead' white areas with black ink-splatter and using white splatter to indicate sunshine coming through the window in panel 2.

Well, that's it. A whole Sweeney Todd page form start to finish. Hope this was moderately interesting.

Dec.

GIRL TALK
























Man, if you told me years ago i'd be spending my days drawing elegant ladies talking in pretty dresses.... well..... i wouldn't have believed you.

Dec.

SWEENEY TODD PAGE 52 INKS

























Here's the inks for page 52. The last post had my layouts for this. You can see how the actual composition of the finished page is nearly exactly as it is in the layouts. That's something i try make sure i do in order to keep the finished piece as spontaneous-looking as possible. Of course, the page will never be purely spontaneous as too much work goes into a page. First and foremost, you have to make sure the storytelling is clear, then try make the page visually interesting, make sure there's room for lettering, reference costumes and backgrounds, flesh everything out in pencil, establish a good and consistent light-source and then eventually ink the bloody thing. That's a lot of work in a page so it's very common for a lot of comic art to look overly laboured at times. I'm really hoping to have enough detail in my final pages yet keep them looking 'fresh' so sticking as close as possible to the original layout really helps me accomplish this. I think the somewhat more spontaneous way i've been inking of late helps too. Instead of doing really clean feathering (for example), i've tried to ramp up the atmosphere in pages by using a somewhat looser and instinctive inking approach.

I must admit, i'm particularly happy with how this page turned out. Hmmm. I'm starting to sound a bit full of myself. I'm sure i'll hate the page in a week. I usually do....

Dec.

2D FESTIVAL 2009

Hey all. Here follows info on this year's 2D Festival, but first, since this is an artblog (supposedly), here's the layouts i did for page 51 of Sweeney Todd.
























Phew! Right, now that that's over with, i've just confirmed i'll be appearing at this year's 2D Festival in Derry, this coming June. I had an absolutely great time last year and I'm really looking forward to this years. The guests appearing so far (with more to be confirmed i believe) are...

David Lloyd
Liam Sharp
Mike Collins
David Hine
Garry Leach
Rufus Dayglo
D’ Israeli
Declan Shalvey (hey... that's me!)
Andie Tong
Staz Johnson
Phil Barrett
Bridgeen Gillespie

Unlike last year, i'm actually participating in a workshop. I believe it will be a Classical Comics orientated workshop with fellow CC veteran Mike Collins. There's plenty of information on the 2D Website, so give it a look.

Dec.

SWEENEY TODD PAGE 51
























Here's another recent page from Sweeney Todd. Normally i spread out posts to show the layouts, pencils and then inks, but not this time. Straight to the good stuff.

Unless ye do wanna see the layouts/ pencils, etc. Just ask and i shall comply.

Dec.

SWEENEY TODD PAGE 50 INKS
























Here's the inks for page 50. Quite happy with the end result here. You can see that i fixed all the stuff that i mentioned was wrong with the pencils in my last post.

I've been using a pen-nib tool for the last few months and got some really nice and loose lines with it on this page (see background characters). Feel like i'm finally getting the hang of it. I also got some nice variation of lines with my brush-pen. I found that when i started using the brush pen, i did a LOT of drybrush. A month or so back, i seemed to barely use any dry-brush and started inking a lot more slickly. Nice to be able to do, but i'm not really interested in slick inking ('slinking'...?). I want messy pages, with lots of texture, so i'm trying to balance the 'slick' with some very gestural lines, and some splatter here and there. It seems to be balancing well in this page, and with most of the pages i've done this week.

Hopefully you all agree.

Dec.

SWEENEY TODD PAGE 50 PENCILS
























Here's the pencils to page 50 of Sweeney Todd. I posted the layouts to this page earlier in the week as well as a detail from one of the panels. You can see that i stuck extremely close to the composition of the layout. I realised in panel 2 however, the the width of the street was a little too narrow (i remember really wanting to have a solid black on the right of the panel to help separate it from the rather large first panel), so i widened it a bit. Because i did so, it was pointed out to me by fellow comics artist Stephen Thompson, that it looked like the barbers pole was coming out of one of the characters' head. In trying to fix one problem, i had created another, so i would have to fix that in the inks. I also had stubble on the wrong character, so that had to be fixed. There was a couple of things my editor suggested i fix up too, so it was no big deal. I'll post the inks pretty soon. Tomorrow maybe. Or later, i dunno, i can't see into the future now, can i?

Dec.

LOST PANEL
























This is a panel lost to the ages. I originally added it into a Sweeney Todd page of my own accord, just to add another beat to the storytelling, but it ended up cluttering up the page a bit, so it had to go. Shame; i liked the drawing and was looking forward to inking it. Ah well, what can one do....?

....well, i guess one can scan it and post it on their blog....

Dec.

SWEENEY TODD PAGE 50 LAYOUTS
























Quite busy with Sweeney Todd at the moment, but here's a layout for one of the pages i'm working on. It was a pretty straight page script-wise, but i really wanted to come up with a more interesting layout design. I've also gone back to doing smaller layouts, with an added greytone to make it clearer. I was doing bigger, more laboured layouts in pencil, but by the time i worked on the actual page, it felt like i was pencilling it twice. I'd get tired of all the pencilling and the pages srarted to feel more dull as a result. Much happier with this approach. I'll post the pencils in a couple of days.

Dec.

ACTION!












Yet another pencilled panel from Sweeney Todd. I'll post a full, inked page soon; i pwomise.

Dec.

A SWIFT KICK UP THE ARSE











I just had to give myself one of these. Soooooooo much work to do.....

Dec.