Commission list open again

I am opening my commissions list, so if there are any of you who have had commission requests turned down recently, or anyone just considering having a commission, now is the time to get your requests in. Prices are now as follows;-

A4 single figure marker drawing. £120 + p&p. These will have some background elements, & will generally speaking be in black & white with a little highlight colour added if I feel it works.

A4 two character marker drawing £175 + p&p. Similar to the single character piece, except it has 2 characters.... obviously

A3 single character marker drawing £200 + p&p. Again, similar to the A4 single character, except it's bigger, some might say "better for framing", I couldn't possibly comment.

A3 print quality art £450 + p&p. Bit difficult to explain this one, basically what you get is a piece of art which would sit comfortably along side any artwork I have produced for Marvel, DC or 2000AD. There are no limitations on the content (up to a point... don't ask for "every single member of the Legion Of Superheroes, EVER!", just use your common sense) so if you are wanting cover recreations, this is the one you want.

Batman and Catwoman, private commission

Jonah Hex

For this private commission I was asked to re-create/re-imagine Darwyn Cooke's cover to All Star Western #28.

Batman & Nightwing

This is a private commission I completed recently. It's an A3 piece, if you would like something similar, contact me via email on staz.johnson@yahoo.com, the price for a commission of this type is £300 plus postage.

Bigfoot sketch

I was listening to a podcast recently about people going missing in North America's National Parks. The theories regarding the disappearances range from the mundane (people just getting disorientated & lost) to the fantastic (aliens, dimensional portals & bigfoot). As a result, I took a few minutes out from working on my current Judge Dredd story to sketch this blighter.

Athena Voltaire

I've been a fan of Steve Bryant's high adventure comic Athena Voltaire, so as you can imagine, I was delighted when Steve asked me to provide a variant cover for an issue in the next arc. He was kind enough to give me carte blanche to draw whatever I saw fit.

I decided to steer away from the usual 1930's adventure tropes of Nazis, instead choosing something more like my favorite pop-culture icon of the period--Universal Monsters.

So here is Athena Voltaire lost in an Egyptian tomb somewhere, unaware that danger is creeping up behind her. There's also a treasure trove of 'easter eggs' (including a nod to another Universal Monster)in the pic too, if you can be bothered to look closely.

Just messing around.

Anyone who has followed this blog will know I have a fondness for vintage comic books, with a more traditional (some may say inferior) approach to the colouring.

These drawings were done just for fun, but it doesn't take much imagination to see that they point to a potential storyline. Whether anything ever comes of it is anyone's guess.

MachineGun Nun

A little something I might pursue one day. While doing this sketch & the whole storyline came to me virtually fully formed. But would anyone read it? There's the rub.

Sketches & sketches & sketches

Sketches, sketches everywhere...

Yet more sketches.

A few more sketches.

A few sketches.

These were done just for my own enjoyment, drawing characters that in all likely hood I'll never get the chance to work on professionally.

Batman & Robin commission process.

I was contacted a while ago by comic art collector Stephen Blair because he wanted a private commission of Batman & Robin. After we had established which version of the characters he wanted (he settled on the classic Dick Grayson Robin & the 70's/early 80's Batman), I set upon creating a quick rough for Stephen's approval. This is what I came up with.

Stephen was happy with this, but work commitments meant I had to put it aside for a while. When I came back to it I decided I wasn't at all happy with the Batman figure  (he looked stiff & posed)or the gargoyles, & so set about doing this revised version.

Once again, Stephen was happy, & so I started ahead with an inked version. However, work once again had to take precedence so I set the piece aside. By the time I was once again able to work again on the piece I discovered that the inked version I had started had been under a pile of junk in my studio, & was so creased I had to be discarded. This was probably a good thing on the whole because once again I decided that I wasn't happy with the figure of Batman, so set upon doing a re-working of the figure.

Although I was happy with this revision, It occurred to me that the figure was similar to (if a mirror image of) the Batman figure in the classic Carmine Infantino illustration.I am of course referring to this image...

This bothered me, so I sketched out  bunch of thumbnail figures to try to come up with an alternative pose. These were some of the discarded attempts, there were more, but I can't find all the scraps of paper with tiny Batman figures to scan.

However, in the end, I decided I liked liked the original (despite it's similarity to the Infantino) & so elected to stick with it, further developing the drawing.

Having settled on this, I pasted the figure into the existing pencil for the commission in Photoshop. This being absolutely the final pencilled version.

All that was left then was to trace the pencil onto the art paper (using a lightbox) with a UniPin fine line marker. Once that was done, I got out my weapon of choice (my Pentel Brushpen) to do the rest of the inking. Here are various stages in that process.

The final touch was to add a little grey ink wash to the sky, & hey-presto, all done!

IF anyone fancies a similar kind of commission, either leave a message in the comments or email me at staz.johnson@yahoo.com. The price for a similar piece is currently £300 plus postage.