Dynamic Dredd?

After Tharg's last comments and in line with some sage advice from Dylan Teague, I revisited the 'two guns' approach for Dredd - with a healthy dose of "have you ever fired two guns whilst jumping through the air?" I think there is a distinct improvement in Dredd's 'power' and the further push on the foreshortened right hand adds more "IN YOUR FACE!" Looking at it again, I now notice the Eagle needs to be further out, to broaden Dredd's shoulders. I'll rework this a bit more, I think.



I've been working on a new website all week, as I feel that the current one isn't really reflective of what I'm doing/want to do more of.
Whilst scanning stuff for the (long overdue) sketchbook pages, I found this sketch of Dredd from a couple of weeks ago - I think it's way too static, but something made me scan it in... something about it really screamed "that's Dredd!" at me... I don't think it's representative of how I think I want my comic pages to look, I think it's more that there's something familiar about this Dredd, he looks 'bigger' somehow...
I've nearly finished building the new site, it's more of a 'refresh' than a rebrand, but hopefully it'll be ready soon and I can upload it.

Channel 4 - Life Class

Today's model was Maria Muñoz. Dancer and choreographer... brilliant pose, from two sides. I really enjoyed today's episode.


Click top to see a composite of the two sketches (I really like this). Click bottom to go to my flickr page where you can view all today's drawings and the previous days' too.

Channel 4 - Life Class

Today's programme had three shorter poses in contrast to yesterday's single set-up.


Consumate professional Ken Fahy hardly moved at all, he had a great physique that was really interesting to draw.


This was my favourite pose of the lot - there were some fascinating details in the hands that I would have loved to have had more time to observe.


The long pose was this classic foreshortened pose, I'm pretty happy with it - although a little longer would have again been good.

I think this is a great programme, Channel 4 has unsurprisingly had complaints - I can see that from a parental point of view, it's not what you want your child to see at lunchtime - but is it really so offensive?

Channel 4 - Life Class

I sat down to eat my lunch and I found that Channel 4 has been running a programme all this week called Life Class: Today's Nude.
I cast aside my sandwich and quickly grabbed a pencil and some paper and started sketching. Good old Channel 4 - nudity at lunchtime, great for the digestion... anyway, I'm still trying to keep a PG rating here, so, if you're interested, click the image below to view the whole sketch.


For all you artists out there, the programme is available on demand here for the next month. The model was the beautiful Kirsten Varley, and this programme was hosted by Gary Hume (Turner Prize nominee and graduate of Goldsmiths).

I might go back and watch the previous episodes - The show is on again tomorrow and Friday @ 12:30 for 30minutes - with about 15-20mins of model time onscreen (Channel 4+1 could also give you a second crack at the whip, so-to-speak). Hopefully I'll post sketches from these other episodes too.

I thought this was a great opportunity to do some much needed life drawing without expensive classes... the only mild criticism I have is that the incidental music was decidedly "soft porn" - something I think life drawing classes struggle with in terms of the public's perception of what they are - careless on behalf of the programme makers, I think.

Twisted Toucan

Well, I'm jumping the gun with this as we still haven't had Phil's Praying Mantis (no pressure)... But after yesterday's posting I was sketching and drew this evil little creature. The next animal to distort was a Toucan, as selected by Matt and I thought that this fit the bill, or rather, the beak!



Burnt, evil, or another demon like the helliphant - you decide... All I know is that it's my choice of creature for the next round - and damn it, I'm choosing a Donkey... no horses or zebras or other equine relatives, the wonderfully expressive Donkey has only that grumpy purple thing representing it's species in popular culture - time to redress the balance!

Zarjaz and Dogbreath Strips

I've been doing some fanzine work for the splendid chaps at FutureQuake Press. I've already done a six page story for the next issue of Zarjaz and I've just finished a three page Gronk story for the next issue of Dogbreath... I'm pretty chuffed as I lettered this strip too. I've got another strip for Dogbreath in the works as well that should be pretty cool too...

Find out more about these two brilliant publications at The Quaequam blog. If you need some reading material until your next Prog or Meg arrives, swing by their shop and order yourself some of the finest small press sci-fi you're likely to read.


This panel is from the six pager, I won't say which 2000AD 'parent' story it's from as I don't want to give too much away until the strip is printed. I felt that I should use a hatching style on this for a number of reasons, evoke part of what the original strip had and also because this is set in the 60s, I wanted a traditional 'older' look to the work - on reflection I'm not sure my hatching is up to the standard I wanted.


This panel is from the Gronk strip. I've used a home-made digital tone as I wanted to control how the 'grey' areas would appear in the final print. I also wanted to test-drive something I'd experimented with before. The other thing to mention for those of you are just along for the ride is that this panel has my depictions of Johnny Alpha and Wulf Sternhammer from Strontium Dog.

I'll submit these (and the Dredd Pin-up) to Tharg, and hopefully share his feedback as soon as I have it!

I do have some more, enormous, headline grabbing news that I can't blog about yet, but when the next issue of Zarjaz comes out... you'll know about it!

***EDIT***
Just had feedback from Tharg - man he's a speedy alien that one!
(copied from his verdant e-mail which pinged into my inbox with a certain authority)

Thanks for the samples, Kevin. Your linework is quite strong, and the pages are nice and clear, but I think you need to work further at your human figure drawing and anatomy. Dredd's foreshortened arms in the pin-up don't look quite right, for example. The characters need to feel like they're moving and have life, and that they have substance to them.

Right, onwards and upwards - I've got more samples to produce - I'll keep working on my figures - I do have some problems with anatomy and foreshortening that I'm working on and hopefully once I've cracked that...

In Speech Balloons

Earlier in the year, I blogged about a free service that turned your handwriting into a workable truetype font... The service provided by yourfonts is no longer free, but I didn't think the font I had was good enough to use for my comic art... There are some fantastic free fonts available on Blambot for using on comic strips - a link I got from the most excellent gentlemen at FutureQuake Press - but somehow, using someone else's (comic) font doesn't feel like I'm lettering myself... kind of like borrowing the hands of another letterer - albeit digitally.


I spent some time in illustrator pushing nodes around the natural letter-forms I had produced in my last attempt. Once I had a font I felt might work and that still had some relationship to my block capitals, I went ahead and paid just under £8 for the automated service. I'm very happy with how the font works, I think it looks pretty good too... an example of it in action can be seen in my previous posting.

The Praying Mantis

Time to share my attempt in the semi-regular inter-web-game I play with Matt and Phil again. I tried and tried to twist, warp, oddify the Mantis in some way or another, but they're so weird in the first place...


I hope this can be read here, if not click the image and you should have no problems...

I was giggling to myself whilst doing this - I hope it elicits the same reaction when read by others

Mean Machine Angel

The new topic for DrawerGeeks is Angel.


I sketched stereotypical Hell's Angels for a bit, even got some great reference together for a Harley Davidson... then I thought about an Angel/Demon thing... but both of those things weren't inspiring me to produce anything I wanted to submit or even show. I was doing a 2000 AD related sketch this morning and something clicked into place.

Mean Machine Angel is a classic Judge Dredd villain. Mean was built in the 'Six Million Dollar Man' sense of the word by a kidnapped Doctor in a shack in the Cursed Earth. To my mind he's going to be a bit rusty and thrown together, a bit like something from Scrapheap Challenge and not at all 'top of the range' cybernetics.

Mean was once a nice boy who liked flowers... so I gave him wings (mainly to make the 'Angel' thing obvious for the uninitiated and nothing at all to do with Red Bull).

Finished Judge Dredd Pin-up

I think I've finished this...


Not much to say really. Pretty happy about how this has turned out.

Judge Dredd Figure Inked

Inks for the Dredd I've been working on.
Experimenting with this currently - I may end up inking the background... depends on how some colour roughs go.

Dredd's Got A Second Sight

My old pal PJ has come up with more pearls of wisdom for aspiring comic artist everywhere... not only that but he sent me some suggestions for my Dredd Pin-up.

 
tightened pencils  •  and tonal values
He kindly made some modifications to yesterday's sketch and was very encouraging with it.
• He enlarged the left hand, pushing the foreshortening further has added slightly more dynamism to the overall pose.
• He also reduced the size of Dredd's helmet to make it part and parcel of the overall head - I think he was right to.

I've adjusted those things in Photoshop to my own file. I've also tightened up the pencils, added background details and some tonal values to check my forms are working ok.

Another Dredd

For the last couple of days I've been feeling a bit down on my drawing. I just don't feel like I can clearly identify my style and say I'm 100% happy with it - it's a touch too dependent upon a clean clear line and that can be time consuming.

There's a lot to be said for a quick expressive style both from a economic and a dynamic point of view. I see such breathtaking results in other artists' work that benefits from quick, expressive penmanship - but when I come to try that myself, even when at my most confident, I am just not happy with the result.


Here are some rough pencils for a Judge Dredd pin-up type image I am working on. Right now there are some nice things going on in those sketchy lines but I know as soon as I start to ink, it'll lose that spontaneity.

Judge Dredd © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD

Tales of the Unexpected

The Cambridge University Press books I did illustrations for earlier in the year are going to be published soon and I received my complementary copies last week...


I thought I'd share a couple more illustrations from Tales of Terror and Tasty Tales here too.

  
I'm pretty chuffed with them, 26 illustrations in total and the reproduction on all of them is damn near spot-on!