Knight & Squire

Some time ago I was asked by my pal & partner in comicbook crime, Jimmy Broxton, to help him out on a project he was working on for DC comics... Knight & Squire. Jimmy was pencilling & inking all the art on the book ( as well as creating lots of back up material) & this intense workload had left him temporarily behind the deadline eightball, something every freelance experiences from time to time. He asked if I could take his already competed thumbnails, & work them up into a more or less inkable pencils cum layouts & I was happy to oblige.

Below are examples of Jimmy's thumbnails, my pencils/layouts, & most interestingly, Jimmy's final inked artwork. Where I still have copies of all three versions of the page, I have combined them into little 'triptych' images. Comparison of the three stages will demonstrate the truely organic method on display, & how the artwork developed through the stages from Jimmy to me & back to Jimmy.

If you want to make some comparison for the pages where I don't have copies of either the thumbnails or the final inks, you could do a lot worse than pick up a copy of the Knight & Squire trade. Written by Paul Cornell & drawn superbly by Jimmy Broxton, it's a fun look at superhero tropes, filtered through  a uniquely British lens.

The Ice Man.

No... not the guy from the X-Men! This is more of the work I did in the last couple of years when I wasn't posting on this blog. For a children's non fiction book about an 'ice mummy' found up in the Alps. As is my usual practice when doing this kind of work, I did the pencil sketch on a printout of the book's layout so I was sure of getting the dimensions correct. This was especially significant on this particular job, since the illustrations vignetted off at the top without a definite border, & I had to be sure that the artwork didn't clash with the body of the text. As you can see, between the sketch & the production of the final colour artwork, I was asked to add some clothes to the figure.

More published work.

More examples of my published work from the last couple of years. The fun part about doing these (& similar pieces) is that I get to handle the whole creative process, from pencils through to final colour, something I rarely get to do when working for comics.

Madefire

When the new digital comics reader app 'Madefire' launched last year, I was asked to contribute a few pages. This strip exists within the 'Captain Stone' narrative, & was intended to be a story within a story. In style, the intention was for the strip to look like one of those comics from the early 90's, when all comic heroes solved their problems with big guns, gritted teeth & (apparantly) no feet... or at least, they weren't visible through all the knee deep perpetual mist/dust.

As is the case with all my comic work these days, the pencils (such as they are) were scanned in then printed out as faint blueline images & the inking was done over these printouts (saves erasing, & also preserves the original pencil should I mess up the inking & require another copy to ink).

I coloured the art in a faux vintage approach, & dropped in a paper texture on a layer below the artwork in order to further enhance the 'old school' illusion.