I'll speak more about this piece in an updated version of this post, but somebody wanted these images at a wallpaper size to download, so here they are... The picture is from the next issue of TMNT Comic, and it should be fairly obvious what it represents!
I finally finished this last night, after a fairly epic colouring session. Of course, after all that, you really can't see that much of the background because of, you know, all the characters obscuring it. But it's nice to know that it's there, eh? I like the way everything fits together on the final piece, but I think if I'd thought the composition through more thoroughly, I would have had Spike holding the severed limb in his left hand, to give the whole piece a little more symmetry. As it is, Spike and Gunn share many similarities in pose, which could prove a bit distracting, although it does unify them in purpose.
Here's the background as it looked before I added the characters, and before I colour-corrected it (darkened it and added a blueish tint), and before I added the rain (which ended up being applied in three layers so it could fall behind and in front of the characters). Obviously the shadow under Illyria was added after this stage as well.
Finally, here's a version of the image in wallpaperable format, with added axe and logo. Just the thing for sprucing up the desktop of today... Anyway, I've got no idea what I'm going to do next, but I hope you've enjoyed this little peek into my (clearly overindulgent) working practices.
So I still can't quite believe that this is all I really have to show for the best part of two and a half hours work (this and the completed shot of Gunn, below, of course). This is one of the reasons a large percentage of professional artists don't draw backgrounds, folks - and of course they have chain gangs to deal with the ink and colour side of things as well. This is also one of the reasons why Dubious Tales had to take one on the chin - it just takes too damn long to do things the way I want to do them.
What takes so long? Well, for I start, I've been doing colour knock-outs on background lines for probably about a year and a half now, and there's no easy algorithm to take out the 'colour-replacing every black line with a different line of colour' part of the equation... Especially when you bring chain-link fences into the reckoning. Those are a real bugger.
Perhaps it's the blogging equivalent of 'blowing my wad', but I'm quite fond of these 'work in progress' jobbies in other places, so here's a quick look at what that Angel image is looking like two days later. I spent a large proportion of Sunday simultaneously listening to the DVD commentaries on Angel Season 5 and inking the pencils I showed earlier (a genius concept I wish I'd thought of earlier, given that I'd never watch the commentaries just on their own... and amazingly my laptop doesn't fall over and die when I simultaneously colour and have a DVD running. Unprecedented!).
On sale 18th October, UK. 76 pages, £2.60
On sale 11 October, UK. 76 pages, £2.60
A colleague of mine saw the pictures I did of the Harry Potter characters (see older posts, below), and wondered whether I'd like to take a shot at doing some wallpapers for his satirical football website, Wake Up Millwall. So, of course, I said yes...
Not being either a Millwall supporter or a football follower in general, I was glad Ricky went to the trouble of finding me the appropriate likenesses, although the pictures were pretty low-res and interestingly cropped... so I had to make up whole lower halves of bodies, etc. on some of the players. Which was an interesting challenge!
Of course, one of the side effects of my unfamiliarity with these players (as compared to characters from TV shows I've followed religiously, or people and friends I see on a regular basis) was that the likenesses needed a lot of tweaking in 'post'. I was drawing from the screen to pencil, and then inking without the benefit of checking my reference again, so I ended up moving around a lot of lines before actually going to colour. Still, it all seems to have worked out nicely in the end.
Hi all, sorry for the lack of the promised regular updates... I'm sure I'll get back on that next week. Anyway, I've been doing the odd piece of art (some weird football wallpapers to show you in a day or so)... but in honour of finally finishing the whole of Angel, I thought I'd knock up a post 'Not Fade Away' image... Before the comics series comes out in a month and picks up the baton 'for reals'. Click to embiggen.
Those of you with memories that encompass Dubious Tales in some fashion (and I assume that's at least three out of the five of you who read this blog on anything approaching a regular basis) may recall that I posted there about working on The Kid's Book Project, a rather fantastic webcomic-originated book conjured from the mind of Mike Rouse-Deane, in which a goodly bucketful of the web's brightest lights contribute a page each to a self-contained kids' book. The only catch being that you can only see the page prior to your own, and thus must either continue the story, or work back from it, depending on whether you're in the batch working from the front or the back of the book.
Now, call me an optimistic Spider-fan, but I was really quite jazzed to see the new designs for the upcoming Nth iteration of a Spider-Man cartoon. Even if the producers are talking about "going back to the halycon days of the Stan Lee / Steve Ditko" era, when they're clearly treading the same modern ground as the 2001 Ultimate Spider-Man revamp, the designs still look fresh, modern, and not too beholden to anything that came before... even if the colours in this jpeg are a little off-putting - those reds make it look like Spidey's been putting too much bleach in his wash!
I've always been a fan of animated Spidey, in all of his quasi-modern incarnations: from watching the 90s animated series on weekday mornings during the summer, or Saturdays as part of Live & Kicking, to picking up the recent MTV-hosted CGI relaunch just before the movie. It still saddens me that the 90s show still hasn't gotten a decent DVD release on either side of the Atlantic - perhaps there are rights issues tied up there, but I remember the show being fairly tight when it came to serialised storytelling (even if the animators still had their hands tied by not being able to depict violence).
Also, and most impressively from my point of view, was the introduction of Indira Daimonji, or Indy, who managed to move the franchise - and Peter's love triangle - into the 21st century in one fell swoop. Here was a character who wasn't a whitebread blonde, who nonetheless managed to be Peter's equal from the outset, and a viable romantic alternative to MJ, all within a handful of episodes. That her 'exit' from the series was as part of an ignoble cliffhanger doesn't detract from the fact that the makers of the series managed to pull a revamp that managed to genuinely integrate a diverse cast of characters into what Marvel would, I'm sure, argue is an immutable template.
