Admin Of The Damned.

(Long Story)

There’s stuff you have to do as a freelance comic artist, that is neither exciting, or ends in great art being created. All the little, shitty jobs that need to be done so creativity can come out to play again. This has been my life for the last two or three weeks now. I’ve had a list in my head of things that need to be done, most of which I’ve been putting off for a while. I’ve been trying to keep my hand in the game by doing some thumbnails here and there, but they’ve all been pretty piss-poor, if I’m honest. On the upside, however… I kind of got my arse-in-gear this week and really took care of a good chunk of what needed to be done. I wiped most of my imaginary ’to do’ list clean, and only have a few tasks left. An unexpected bonus of this is I’ve almost immediately started to feel my creative-juices start to ferment again. I know that if I can just keep my head down and pass through the final mile of the valley of boredom, there’s a good chance creativity will be waiting for me on the other side. Then we’ll hold hands and skip through sunny fields. Maybe point at rainbows together and chase butterflies. It’s going to be magical.

(Short Story)

Got some shit done this week.

Feels good.

Art Is Hard.

It’s too hot to draw right now. I wasted two-and-a-half hours last night, trying to lay down some rough layouts for a pin up I wanted to do. All I ended up with in the end was a blank A3 sheet of Bristol Board, with a lot of rubbing-out marks on it. I was angry about this last night (or about as angry as you can get in this heat), but today I had to go down town to top-up my phone, and noticed a lot of girls wearing really short denim hot-pants, and suddenly my angry towards, and hatred of the summer lifted, just like that.

That’s the thing about the summer, it’s soooooo hot, I can’t think straight, and I’m sweating out my ears. Everything’s ten-times harder in the summer, and work is suffering. Yet, you see one pretty girl out-and-about, and all is forgiven.

On a less sleazy note… why is it so hard to get books of photo-reference of Victorian London? I always thought there would be dozens of books of this nature, but turns out not so. This also made me really mad when I was in the local bookshop today looking for such a book, and having no luck… until I notices the cute girl behind the counter wearing the world’s tightest pair of jeans, and all was well again.

I’m just gonna post a bit of art above… just to break the awkward, pervy tension… I like this shot, as it’s me playing around with, and trying to suggest menace with shadow.

Those Who Wait.

Couldn’t sleep last night because of the heat, so stayed up half the night listening to Kid A in 8-Bit (the national anthem, track 3, sounds amazing.) I like the hot weather, but Summer nights are killers. I guess it’s that time of year again to say goodbye to regular sleep. See you again around late August.

Finally got my Blu-ray copies of Demons 1 and 2 through the post this morning. It’s been a long six months since they were first meant to be out at Xmas. Then they were meant to be out earlier in the month, but release date got pushed back twice. It was starting to get like a bad joke. Had a quick look at the HD quality earlier, and they look really good.

Hotel In The Woods.

The work I had plan for this week kind of fell through, so I thought I’d use the time to colour up the cover artwork for the forth issue. I’m not the world’s greatest colourist, but hopefully I’ve got to a point where if you walked into a comic-shop, and saw my covers on the shelf, it wouldn’t offend the eye. I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve when it comes to colouring… only problem is, it feels like most people now have millions of tricks up their sleeve when it comes to computer colouring. I could go with the theory that most modern artwork is overproduced. There’s so many filters and textures going on, it’s just noise after a while. There was maybe some line artwork there at some point, but now it’s just buried under a ton of lens flair and garish colour. But that said, I’m very jealous when I see artwork by someone who really knows what they’re doing on a computer. I know I’ll never be a pioneer of the digital age, which this now is. My only aim now is just not to suck at colouring, which hopefully I don’t.

I’m very aware that I’m trying to master line artwork, in an age where line artwork is more-and-more disappearing. I spent eight or nine years inking, before something clicked, and I felt I was really starting to do something interesting with my inks, and now technology has made the act and art of inking obsolete. Thanks a lot, technology, you DICK. It’s going to weird to see how that all plays out in the future of comics.

Anyway, here’s the colour version of this cover. I recently got really bored of drawing humans (as that’s all you draw as a comic book artist) and wondered if I could be outrageous and draw a cover with no people on it. Something you rarely see. This is where I ended up with that thought. A hotel and a corpse as the cover stars. One nice surprise I didn’t bank on, was that not having anybody on the front adds a bit of creepiness to it. No one to relate to as a reader. It’s probably the one out of the four that must looks like a horror comic cover. I’d like to think there’s a bit of Richard Corben going on in this shot (but that might just be wishful thinking on my part.) Being the forth and final cover, and being the one to round off this mini-series, I guess it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to save the scariest till last. I had planned to really make the corpse look really rotten and wrinkly in the colour stage, but playing around with it, I thought it looked better with a kind of bleached feel going on. I wanted Blake to have a rotting fruit look about him, but no matter which way I played it, it just looked wrong. Bleached Blake pops a lot better, I think. He’s too small on the cover to do much with him. When I tried to wrinkle him up, he just looked like a dark shape with no features after a while.

Looking at this cover now… hmmmm…needs more lens flair.

Zing!

HA! HA! HA! Even with his recent pimping out of Yoda in god-awful phone ads, I’d still give Lucas a little credit for pulling this sweet move. The guy’s a crafty business man… that’s why he can sell you the same three movies over-and-over again (how many versions of The Star Wars trilogy do you own?)

In other news: Lego Hell looks amazing. It’s selling me on a life of sin, if this is what hell looks like. Here’s an interesting fact for the day… a Lego vagina looks more realistic blurred than uncensored. It’s the only thing on god’s earth that gets ruder when censored (scroll down for the money shot… “a Lego vagina”… there’s some words I never thought I’d catch myself typing.)

Literature’s Greatest Villain.

Wow… this movie may be taking a kicking online before it’s even out, but I’m still looking forward to seeing Dracula 3D, if and when it does get released in the UK. I was a little burnt out on all things Dracula a few months ago, but watching this new trailer, I’m back in the mood now (I’ve even got a copy of The Bloody Red Baron, which I hope to start reading at some point this week.) It’s Dracula done by Argento, hopefully something interesting well get thrown up in the mix. I’ve never seen an Dario Argento movie I didn’t get something out of. And that’s coming from a guy who watched Trauma this weekend just gone.

Cover Story.

The cover usually comes at the end for me. A little treat to round off and put a full stop to an issue. However, while trying to work up some thumb-nails for pin-ups, out of the blue, I came up with a design for the cover art of Issue #4. Something that I really wanted to run with. Creativity is a lot like that, sometimes. You try and order a turkey sandwiches, and it brings you a bowl of soup instead, and there’s no sending it back. I think it sums up the feel of this mini-series really well, and is probably the one out of the four that must looks like the cover to a horror comic (thanks to cadaver Blake, no doubt.) Being the final cover, I didn’t want to give anything away, and I think this image is mysterious enough, without giving any spoilers.

It’s strange that the cover for Issue #3 was so problematic, and ended up with me having to draw it twice. I like the cover to Issue #3, but it was a long and bumpy road to get to that final image. Whereas this cover seemed to float out of nowhere, with no real effort. I’d done a few thumb-nails, as to what Issue #4’s cover might look like, but I thought it would take months for me to work out what the design should be. It usually comes together during the making of an issue. Reading back scenes I’ve drawn and working off those. Maybe because it’s a later issue, I already had enough ideas to have a stab. It’s going to be weird drawing an issue with the cover already in place. I might end up hating it in a couple of weeks and scrap it, but I very much doubt it. For now, I really like this design and don’t know when I’ll get around to having a bash at colouring it.

Just finished reading what I think is one of the best British horror novels of recent times, The Hungry Moon (no wiki link, but you can find a basic blurb here.) Such a great story and concept. The more I think about this book, the more I feel this book is one of my favourite horror novels of all time. It’s one of those novels where it’s devilish-fun to watch the shit hit the fan. Nothing scarier then well written chaos. Setting it up, then picking it apart.

Score.

Went to the dentist today for yearly check up, and got the all clear, so celebrated by eating a whole pack of strawberry laces. Then found a bargain-bucket £3 DVD copy of Night Of The Demons. Why can’t leaving the house always be this awesome?

 

I’m still sticking to the story that the six in Resident Evil 6 looks like a giraffe getting a blow-job. Now the design for the cover-art has been released, I can post a proper link, see? It’s like a magic-eye picture… just let your sight go blurry, and the bestiality will unfold in front of your very eyes.

Hold Up.

Getting back to Issue #3 now, and it looks like someone’s about to get some unwanted drunken attention. This scene is where I like to think the shit-storm really starts to take shape. The good thing about later Issues is you can start paying off on some of your earlier set ups. I really like that about longer narrative. Getting the set up in place maybe a nightmare, but the pay off scenes are pure bliss.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to spend the rest of the day finding out if these Han-Solo Ice Trays are real, and can I buy it off the net somewhere? If I can’t have a novelty Pez dispenser, maybe a unique ice tray will scratch that itch?

The People In The Corner Of Your Eye.

Ever thought you’ve seen something in the mirror that wasn’t there? Something or someone just out of sight catch your eye for a second, but are gone when you quickly try to focus on them. I was just reading this interesting article on the theory behind this phenomena. What’s really scary is how often in life your own brain isn’t really on your side. I find that way scarier than crappy ‘shadow-people’.

If I see one more horror movie where someone’s in the bathroom standing at the sink staring at themselves, and they go to get something out the bathroom medicine-cabinet, and as they close the mirrored door there’s something\someone behind them, and they scream and turn around and no one’s there. If I see that scene one more time in a horror movie, I’m gonna scream. I’m more freaked out when someone opens the medicine-cabinet in a horror movie, and there’s no one there when they close it. This scene should be outlawed from horror movies for ten… maybe twenty years, until it starts being scary again.

Anyway, you should read this article. Because science can be just as scary, and as much fun as the supernatural sometimes.

The Final Chapter.

As I start prep work for Issue #4, the last issue. I just wanted to visualizes something I’ve had swimming around in my head since about Summer 2009. Long term projects are incredibly hard and grating, which is why most people are smart enough to avoid them. Being born in the digital age, I always saw this massive project set out ahead of me as a giant download bar in my head. Every once in a while, I will work out how much I’ve got done, and then see the download bar fill in a little bit more in my mind. Back in the early days, this was a grim practices, as the bar was so low and empty, it seemed undoable. I don’t know why I would do this, as early on it was just torture, seeing how little I’d done, and how far I had to go. Many times I didn’t want to see that image in my head, and tried not to think about it, but it’s kind of stuck with me these past few years. I may not be finished yet, but at least I’m at a point now where I don’t wince every time that bar pops into my head. In fact, what once was a form of mental self-abuse, is now a welcome sight in my mind’s eye. It’s way too early for celebrations, but I can kind of see the top of the mountain now. Most people give up on long term projects in the very early stages, so as they haven’t lost much time on it. At 75%, even if it was the worse graphic-novel of all time, I’d be a fool not to finish it. So I thought I’d make this little gremlin real and post it here. It’s not often in life you get to see someone else’s imaginary demon. Enjoy.

I really love this short animation. How can you not love something that references The Thing, Lovecraft, and City Of The Living Dead in a hundred and forty-five seconds? I don’t know if they have 'Countdown' outside of the UK, so the joke may be a little lost on some. But I think this short is awesome, and would recommend checking it out regardless.

 

And then check out this claymation of The Thing in 3D… Hmmmm, didn’t this used to be Pingo? Pretty shitty thing to do, if Pingo set his lawyers on this guy or something. It’s only a fan-film. Aren’t films like these protected as they’re parodies?