the animation art auction

just hijacking my post this week to advertise this worthy cause - hope thats ok!

DELETE

...Too late now. Another sketch from my mini-Who sessions last week. Just playing around with proportions and Nickifying him a little. Y'know. For fun.

Old Man

When I draw with Manga Studio I tend to go straight to ink and skip the pencil stage to save time but I've been playing around the pencil tools a bit recently. Here's one of my experiments.

Thor

X-MEN + SPIDERMAN... from 1996!!!

Posting a pic from 15(!?!) years ago today...

A friend of mine from school scanned this and sent it to me a while back. I think I was planning to draw this comic once I had finished my epic X-Men vs Squadron* crossover. Not bad for a 14 year old, eh?

It's crazy to look back at this stuff. I can kinda remember where I must have lifed some of these poses from. None of it was traced though, I always tried to duplicate a pose in order to figure it out.

[*Squadron were a highly original, not-at-all-like-the-X-Men super-hero team of my own creation]

Dec.

Thompson, I Salute You.

Seeing Thompson's post a few days back made me realise two(count 'em) things; 
1: That blue dude what he drew looked a lot like one of my characters, John Noble. All he needed was a trademark salute.
2: Thompson would have wanted me to steal his drawing and scrawl my changes over it. Hell, It'd be wrong NOT to do it.

Doctor WTF

Random

Some random doodles, just playing around with Photoshop.

I had a go off drawing the new Superman costume. TO be honest, already when I see the classic costume it has started to look old to me. Bizarre. The new DC stuff is great sofar. I'm buying and committed to following way more DC books than I used to. I buy them a month late for the lower price. Hopefully Marvel will follow suit soon

THUNDERBOLTS SPREAD

For the recent Point One issue of Thunderbolts, there was a double page spread that featured nearly every Thunderbolt who has ever been on the team. This was a LOT of fun for me as I got to have a go at characters I had never drawn before, like Hawkeye, Venom, Bullseye, and even Jolt from the original T-Bolts run. I used the opportunity to draw Crossbones and Juggernaut too, who had both left the team at this stage. There were a lot of characters to compose on the page and when I started doing my layouts at the usual size (5x7.5cm) I just wasn't able to get them all composed the way I wanted. I decided to make the layout bigger; so I could both compose all the characters and get a lot of the figure construction figured out before I started pencilling. I did this layout 3 times bigger than usual; takes up most of an A3 page.


As I recall, after seeing this layout Jeff Parker (Tbolts mastermind) thought that the lettering placement should go through the image more, instead of being sidelined to either side of the page, which was a perfectly good note. To rectify this, I moved the more recent T-Bolts line-up more to the right and took a couple of those and moved them up a bit. See how further up Man-Thing is in this version and how much space is left between Venom and Ghost.


This took a lot of time to research and get right but I'm really happy with how it came out. Jeff didn't make me add all those T-Bolts, the script just asked to include the main characters over the years. I can't be sure, but I got nearly all of them. Might be missing 4 or 5, but I wanted to give long term fans a really cool image where they could see their favourite character from the long-running series.

Dec.

Irish Doodles.

Early sketches of the lead character in my book, Half Past Danger. Just playing about with bits and pieces before settling on his look. Fun.

northlanders

heres a rough from a comic based on Brian Boru that I was starting to (re)develop for Clo Mhaigh Eo earlier this year. I did'nt get too far and now O'Brien Press have got one out so I guess it won't go any further.
The first development for it goes back to 2003 - I'll post some stuff I did back below ... the painted backgrounds and layout is by Ross Stewart, character designs by my younger self-

Little Nemo for Starship Sofa

He has a Viking Helmet.

What?

They Turn Into Cars

I really gotta try and catch up on me themes; berserkers, tarts and Vikings and I've no time to draw even the glimpse of a horn? I'm a fool to myself. Instead, here's something I found on an old Hard Drive; One of the sample pages from back in 'The' day that has me drawing robots full-time now. Check it.

And buy the flip out of NORTHLANDERS. What's the Norse that could happen?

Northlanders

I ordered all the trades of Northlanders a good month ago and unfortunately they still havent arrived, which is annoying. Still, its good fun drawing an ol sea hardened viking

BRIDA and MAR

This is a character study I did of the two main characters in my Northlanders arc; Brida and Mar Hauksson. This is pretty much how I drew them in the book, except Brian Wood asked me to make sure Brida's hair was down. I was trying to give her a signiture look, but Brian pointed out that back in Viking times, a woman with her hair up meant that she was married. You learn something new every day!

Dec.

Declanders

Dec's first issue of Northlanders hits shelves on wednesday, go buy several copies. We've seen the art and it's gorgeous, right up Dec's alley. Besides, Northlanders is a fantastic book anyway, so you've been missing out if you haven't given it a go yet.

I remember reviewing Dec's portfolio when we were looking for somebody to take over on Freakshow after myself and Thompson had left. Do I wish now that I'd never recommended him for the book? Of course I do. In five or so years he's gone from delivering coal to drawing books for both Marvel and DC simultaneously.

It's hard to begrudge the fella all his success, given that he works really hard and he's an all-round good egg. But I manage it.

laura veirs

sigh - i had planned an art nouveau tribute to joanna newsom for this weeks theme , even started it but did'nt get it finished in time. heres a 2007 sketch of lovely laura veirs in the meantime.

Granny Goodness!

No pretty girls for me either- but she really wants to pinch your cheeks- with pliers.

Maybe you're into that.

Snappy Snaps

Artwork I did a while back for a short story anthology. Sorry if you were expecting boobs. I'll try and deliver some on a different occasion.

The Scathach

More of a colour test more than anything

SATANA

Sorry; still swamped with work, but here's something I was playing around a few weeks ago that features a drawing of a sexy lady.

Dec.

Elizabeth Huntington-Moss (Colour)

Looks like it's ladies week on the blog judging by that saucy little symbol up there, so I figured I'd show more of Elizabeth Huntington-Moss, the female lead in my creator-owned book, Half Past Danger. If you'd like to see more of this lady, or just see what I've been up to in general, then please head on over here to the book's production blog, where you can follow along as I make an arse of myself on the internet. Moreso.

Hmm. The colours seem a tad over-saturated here for whatever reason, better look at them over on the HPD blog.

first date

i did this sketch for the theme "first date" on the saloon blog -