Zombie secretary

Quick one today - a zombie secretary. This was going to be a character in a new story, but that story has morphed into an entirely new story, which I shall tell you about in due course.

Also...

Also, I'm now script editor for Tales of the... and The Sleepless Phoenix.

I should have told you that. I apologise.

Surgical sketching

Good news if you hadn't heard it. Actually, it's pretty good even if you had. Kronos City has found a new home at Time Bomb Comics (you can read about it here, at the Kronos City blog, with a line drawing that I did of all the Kronos City leads, which I', pretty pleased with. I'll be interspersing updating my own blog with the Kronos City one.

But back to my solo stuff, which this week takes the form of my Drawing London on Location biweekly excursion. This weekend was to the Hunterian Museum of Surgery, a lovely place filled with pickled walrus and human face. I enjoyed this one a lot. I took a lot of the different items on display and made a composite sketch. The real place is much cleaner and has no blood stains.

The face on the back wall of the image is a replica of the death mask of Isaac Newton. Nifty.

 

The second piece of the day is from the park across the road from the museum, which, I think, is Lincoln Inn Fields. In this picture you will see a bandstand, a made-up lady (as in from my head, not covered in garish face paint) and lots of squiggles.

Comics Miscellany

A couple of comics themed pieces this week. This is a sketch of Karl and Azure from Kronos City, which has been knocking about my sketchbook for a month or two. I'm pretty pleased with it, particularly with Karl.

This next one I drew after reading some of Peter David's X-Factor, which is a good read. It's been pointed out that Jamie looks like me in this picture. I'm not sure what that says about my inner workings.

I shall be at BICS this weekend. I'll tell you about it afterwards, I'm sure.

Pigs in love. The geese are just friends.

As part of my drawing on location group, we went out last weekend to Hackney Farm and Victoria Park. Behold the results.

 

 

Pencils, inks and hungry witches

We had a two part series running on Tales of the... over the last two weeks. They're a couple of dark fairy stories, loosely inspired by Jim Henson's The Storyteller, the mid-90s television show, by the Henson company and written by the late Anthony Mingella. The first of them (Tales of the Storytide presents The Little King with No Son) was fun to produce - it's an audioplay, with a lovely accompanying illustration by Ruth Kelly.

The second (Tales of the Storytide presents The Prince's Smile) is a piece of illustrated prose, and presented an interesting opportunity for some artistic experimentation with my good friend, and fellow Tales of the... co-creator, Stephen Downey. I did some rough pencils for the piece and he inked over them. This marked the first time that he had inked another artist's work and the first time that I had my work inked by another artist.

And I think the results are pretty impressive, with Stephen's moody inks suiting the subject matter much more than my more cartoony, clean style. Plus, he fixed up lots of basic drawing errors. What's that? I didn't say anything.

Presented for your intrigue and, hopefully, pleasure is a comparision of the inked and pencilled pieces.  You can click on them to see them in all their unfettered glory.

Above you can see the first of them. If I had been inking them myself, I would have been using some brush pens and black drawing pens, whereas Stephen goes for ink and brush. Notice how he added a light source? I don't even need to pretend that I did that on purpose because that's something I usually decide on when I'm inking myself, but Stephen has much stronger shadows than I do.

 

I think the prince in this second image looks a little bit like Alex Willmore's work, which adds a nice symmetry or serendipity, or something beginning with s.

And here's the last image. I think this is the best one. Stephen took a very unfinished pencil drawing and turned it into something special. The moon was a lovely touch, and if you notice the mortar looks much less like an antwerp, which, for those of you familiar with the Quest for Glory series, will add a further degree of whatever word beginning with s was decided to be the best one. 

*looks at watch* I spent an awful long time farting around on photoshop arranging those tonight.

The future, for which I have really worked, is mine.

Tesla was coming at me from three different sources today, so I thought I would get my own back by drawing him.