I guess it’s no secret that I’ve been going through a bit of a dry patch creatively, lately. I always fall into this trap that when I’m drawing sequential pages for long periods, I miss doing pin-ups. Then I get some free time to do them, and my mind goes blank. This seems to happen to me a lot for some reason. I’ve got artist friends who go for months sometimes without drawing. If I go longer than two weeks, I start to freak out. I always like to be working on something. My brain has been a little more forthcoming with ideas and designs in recent days (thank god), so I do have a couple of ideas to be getting on with. The first of which is above.
I like group monsters (or what I would call cannon-fodder baddies) like Zombies and Cybermen, and have always wanted to do my own take on them. So this is mine. I’ve been calling them Nearly People. They’re like walking, evil, full-size human-anatomy toys. Doing this pin-up was mainly about nailing down their look. How they come across on the page and so on. Their innards are a bit fiddly to draw, and for some reason I always see them fighting grotty, sexy punk\biker chicks in my head, when I picture them. It’s an idea I differently wanna flesh out in coming months. People like their baddies en masse these days. I blame video-games.
I was talking to a friend recently about character designs and posting them online. He had a character he’d drawn recently that he was very pleased with. He was very cagey about details like the name and nature of this character he was working on, only that he thought it could be a really cool idea and he was worried if he posted anything online, someone could nick it (I wasn’t sure if he meant he was scared someone would download and repost the actual artwork as their own, or if he was scared someone would just copy his character idea?) I kind of know what he meant, as sadly some people wouldn’t even think twice about taking someone else’s idea (hence why I nearly didn’t posted the above bit of art today, as it‘s a concept I‘ve been working on for a while now.) The nice thing about posting artwork publicly is that you get feedback, and can test ideas out in a public-forum. The downside is you’re never sure when some slimy gobshite’s gonna swim out of the murky depths and see something he likes and try and take it. However, here’s my counterpoint to that. As someone who has just spent three-and-a-half years putting together his own graphic-novel, I will just say this… getting a project off the ground is hard. I mean SUPER hard. This world is full of people who have the world’s greatest idea for a graphic-novel in their head, and they tell themselves one day they’re gonna do it. Maybe they even draw a few pages before telling themselves they’ll finish it later, but they know deep down later will never come. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure arseholes steal ideas all the time (Gentlemen Broncos style), but stealing an idea is only half the battle. You have to be more worried as to whether they’re disciplined enough to actually work hard and do anything with it. If they are… then you’ve got real problems. A good idea on its own isn’t enough. Any success would also have to come from the work-and-effort you put behind this idea. Not that I think anybody’s gonna steal my above idea (or that it’s even worth stealing, for that matter), and all-in-all, I am a fan of publicly posting art. I guess it’s a risk all creative people take these days, sadly, as many of you probably know. Personally, it’s always an ongoing battle as to what you hold back, and what you put out there.
On a completely different note… I’m not gonna lie, I’m kind of psyched they’re showing reruns of Knightmare on TV tonight. In many ways, Knightmare was the Game Of Thrones of the 80s. Minus the rutting.
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