Phoenixing it up

Finished the rendering on the previous piece, so here it is in all its

mediocre glory.

Phoenix Part One

I'm still finishing up the rendering on this one, but here's the work in progress...

Demon in the bottle

As part of my ongoing practicing, I've been thinking about doing a series of iconic covers... covers...

Here's one!

I'm back....

Hello! I'm back... Creative stuff had to take a back seat there for a year or so, but it's cleared now, so I'm back at the drawing board.

Worked on this piece this week. It's not great - could feel atrophy in my drawing skills, but I had fun and I kept at it. Following some magazine tutorials for a bit until I suck less.

Also, look. I put a hand in the front. And it almost looks like a hand. A hideous, malformed hand, but a hand none the less. I was pleased that I actually put a hand in the foreground.

Like a sparrow through a brightened room

When a man loves a zombie

I haven't been very productive the last couple of weeks (damn you Dragon Age, being social and/or drunk...although I realise the first two are probably oxymorons), so here's a quick partially finished one. This is based on a really loose two minute jobbie I did on the bus. I was pretty pleased with the expanded version - a bit more detailed but retaining the looseness of the orginial sketch. This pair are looking at something, but I'm not going to tell you what it is.

This history t'aint in natur'

I arrived late at the drawing on location group this week, so I only got one picture drawn, but I was reasonably pleased with it. I didn't quite manage to convey the scale of this (it was an escalator running up into a model of the earth) but I did manage to convey a big slimey tongue coming out of sphere. I *do* wish to return so that I can accomplish my goal of drawing Charles Darwin riding a mammoth prehistoric sloth.

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.

Relocation, relocation, relocation

Hello! I have returned to my blog, which has become accustomed to my long absences. Much has changed. I'm now in London, and doing different things, so you'll be seeing considerably different stuff up here now. I've joined a drawing on location group, which is taxing my drawing in a much different way than I'm used to. It's been much longer than I'd care to admit since I drew landscapes and architectures. Here's some scans of my first couple of drawing trips.

First up is Richmond Park. This was the first landscape work I'd done in years and years, and it definitely shows. Pretty ropey.

Next up is another one near Richmon Park. There was a small fire which I exaggerated and added a spectator. Still pretty ropey.

I hadn't been extremely pleased with what I'd produced so far, so I decided to go for a more stylised approach, which I enjoyed a lot more, and I think is much more suited to my temperment.

I then stalked a squirrel for half an hour. I've got about 50 three second sketches of this little bugger. He wouldn't keep still.

What a difference two weeks makes. This is from my second trip with the group, down to Camden Lock. I was pretty pleased with this one. Still a ways to go but much better than the first couple of attempts. I spent much longer on this one than the other ones as well.

In other news, I now have an A3 scanner, so look out for me scanning in many big things and shrinking them down to fun-size.

AJC

The world's first completely silent runners

There's always music in the air.

These are quick two minute jobbies but that gum you like is going to come back in style.

Poison Ivy Sketch

Woops. Haven't posted since October. Bad Andrew. He will be punished.

S'Been a While

My weekly blogging has taken a bit of a nosedive of late but I plan to rectify that.

Had a very fun BICS at the weekend, where I met a lot of fellow Insomnia creators and staff which was great and some of Team Kronos City met for the first time. There was some bonding on Moomin love.

In Kronos City news, the first draft of the script has been finished!

Here's some pictures. Knock yourself out by looking at them. With your eyes.

First up is Guillermo del Toro looking worried.

The second should need no introduction. If it does, there's something gravely missing in your life.

The Truth About Kronos City...

Lauren put up a post detailing how she thought that the idea for Kronos City came about, and I promised her that I would put up the real story, which isn't as interesting as all the mystery...I was out for coffee with my housemate, Ruth, and our friend, Elaine, and Ruth made a comment about how she measures time in streets or streets in time - I can't quite remember which. It was to do with how long it takes to get somewhere being determined by how many streets there are between you and it. Anyhoo, that planted the idea of streets made of time, which changed into canals of time, which was the starting seed for Kronos City.

I'm not entirely sure exactly where the karma idea came from. I was walking home from work (it's about 40 min) and I came up withthe whole karma inc concept, in a pretty similar form to how it ended up, although there's a few new ideas and subpolts that came together from some other stories that were floating in my head.

So there you have it...

I'm also firing up a sketch I did of Elektra a few weeks back. I like my brush pen.