Ok, if you’ve followed me on my blog or on twitter you’ll know that I’ve been in something of a battle with digital drawing – occasionally digital drawing wins a fight but the war always goes to analogue.

It’s been a longer running battle than you know.

My first computer was an Amstrad CPC464, in 1984. In those days you’d buy magazines with listings on them to type into the computer, and I typed my first drawing program in, which I tweaked and changed and modified until it was pretty full featured (well, as full featured as it could be, you could literally watch a flood fill fill every pixel and real time, it was so slow). That was my first experience of digital drawing.

In 1987 when I went to college and was asked what I wanted to do I said I loved computers and drawing and wanted to do something with both. They told me to do Technical Drawing – which, these days is all done in CAD systems, and in those days was done on paper with rulers and set squares and was mind numbing. Really, it was the worst advice. If I’d known then that computers would become so essential in drawing in later years anyway, I’d probably have simply pursued an art career.

In 1989 Autodesk Animator came out, and because I was working in a computer retailer, I got my hands on a copy and played with it – it was my first exposure to layers (there were only two layers, and I’m not even sure they were called layers then. There was no blend modes – you could only scratch and reveal a layer below the current layer).

I used to love tomorrow’s world, especially anything to do with computer graphics – I remember watching someone using a really early light pen to draw directly on to a computer screen – pretty sci fi, and amazing and thinking I wanted to do that.

In about 1989/90 I got my hands on corel draw (and would go on to train people in it) and started computer lettering – albiet by printing out the letters onto A4 paper and cutting out and sticking on the page. The range of fonts was the big limiting factor though, there was nothing like the organic hand lettering style fonts that are so prevalent now.

The cintiq has been part of my tool box for a couple of years now, as has Manga Studio. I bought version 3 in the states and never used it, version 4 came out and I upgraded out of a sense of ‘this is probably useful for corrections’ and it’s become pretty much essential to my workflow. But it’s mostly for corrections and dealing with the large amount of art that you end up amassing (I use story files to keep all the pages of a comic together). I’ve drawn the occasional page, but it’s never been as satisfying as paper, brush and ink.

That hasn’t really changed, but, I have been drawing more in digital, in fact, I’ve now drawn two episodes of Dredd entirely digitally (bar one traditionally inked page).

There’s still nothing to beat the excitement of getting the ink and brush to do what you want, but, on the other hand, digital allows me to start drawing without the mental prep work and fretting that traditional inks normally take (where’s my brush? has it split? is this ink too thick? gah)

And now, now, I’m going to see if I can’t do an entire issue of a 22 page comic in digital.

I’ve never had any formal art training, beyond O-level (in 1986, which I failed) anything I’ve ever learnt about art has been self taught – though ‘taught’ is a rather grand word for ‘messed about until it looked right-ish’.

Today I enrolled in an online painting course, Chris Oately is a character designer who’s worked for Disney and runs an online school for artists. The course I’m taking is “The Magic Box” – and 18 month long course on digital painting (with a heavy lean towards the animated/cartoony artwork, rendered realistically.)

I’m excited and a little intimidated. It’s easy – very easy – to convince yourself that your skillset is now fixed in stone, and can never be changed beyond a little nudge one way or another. My hope is that this painting course will have as big an impact on my black and white comic work as it will on any colour work I do in the future.

The 2000AD fan film “Judge Minty” is now available to watch on youtube.

In case you don’t know: Judge Minty is based on an old Judge Dredd strip, and was being made around the time of the Dredd movie. Minty’s looks are very much the comic books looks – in fact, the Minty Judge’s uniform is easily the most successful attempt at a real Judge’s uniform I ever saw.

I was asked to contribute a little design work for the movie for the Gila Munja – which apparently was used (though, since the Gila Munja is mostly invisible, you’ll not see much of it!)

Written/sketched between some stolen hours, here’s a free pdf comic. The plan is to rewrite/redraw it properly, and throw it on comioxology. But god knows it/when that’ll happen, and since it’s free comic book day tomorrow and I haven’t updated the blog in an age, here it is. It’s a PDF document- you can download here.

I’ve blogged this previously, but I’m in this month’s imagine FX, having written an article on Drawing a comic page in Manga Studio (which required me to write a one page comic strip as well).

Here’s a preview of the magazine, and a youtube video ad for it!

Let me know what you think, and don’t forget to tell Imagine FX! (maybe if I’m lucky, they’ll let me have another go, and this time I’ll draw giant robots fighting…)

Have you seen Brian K Vaugn and Marcos Martin’s new digital comic “Private Eye“? If not, you should – it’s an interesting and entertaining sci fi tale and a pay what you want comic book format.

One of many interesting things about it is that the image format is 16:9 widescreen – like a movie, rather than the more usual widescreen format for digital comics of 4:3 (which corresponds to the iPad screen size).

When it appeared I was curious about why it was in this format, it seemed counter intuitive to me, well, Marcos Martin laid his thinking in the podcast with Pop Culture Hound.

You should listen to that as he’s clearly a smart and humble guy.

There were a couple of key decisions in his thinking (and I’ve paraphrased his quote here, but I don’t think I’m misrepresenting it)

“It was wide screen as opposed to slightly more square format because it’s designed to fit on your computer widescreen. My thinking behind it was that almost everyone has a computer, but not everyone has an ipad or a tablet.  I’m not sure yet if I made the right decision on that front from a commercial point of view, because there might be more people viewing it on the tablet or ipad than on a computer screen. Then, again, creatively, what the landscape format offered me was a greater connection with the Los Angeles theme. So, in a kind of subtle way, that was a way of reinforcing  atmosphere. It’s a combination of both things.”

Any ways, interesting. Go and listen to the full thing.

(FWIW I completely understand his thinking, and don’t disagree with it. Though, I do think he’s right that most of his readers WILL be reading it on a tablet rather than a computer monitor. I think one of the big reasons that digital comics has finally taken off is because things like iPads exist, and computer comic book reading only lend themselves to the sort of thing you can glance at rather than become truly engrossed in…)

I feel like I’ve blogged this before, but searching is turning up nothing, so here goes…

Contrapposto is an italian term meaning “counter pose” (I’ve cribbed this bit from wikipedia) essentially twisting a post so that the top half and lower half of a figure are at different angles from each other. Here’s a dead simple diagram of same.

(or, if you want to see how a proper artist does this, check the google image search)

One of the lessons of contrapposto is that contrasts are visually interesting – whether, in it’s true meaning, the contrast of the angle from hip to shoulder or whether it’s in a more rounded composition, where the contrast is between light and dark (actually this one has a name: chiaroscuro) or a contrast in scale of characters (typically by exaggerating the normal scale of perspective).

(BTW as may be obvious to some, I have no formal art training, I got as far as O-levels, age 16, failed it and then never went near school for art ever again,  these are things I’ve picked up, and if you want to add to this slender base of knowledge, I’d be more than grateful!)

My biggest time killer and, consequentially, vice, is dicking around on the internet. That perpetual cycle of refresh/twitter/refresh/email/refresh/facebook. It’s a twitch now, an involuntary spasm while I’m doing things. I think I’d feel lost with out it – a phantom twitch that would reach for a refresh button at any chance (standing by a window, waiting on the bank opening, wipe finger down window with the hope that it’d refresh like an iPhone app).

I’ve never smoked, I drank rarely (and occasionally still do) and I’ve never played video games. A few years ago, I did start playing Half Life (yes, the first one) but I soon realised that a) I wasn’t very good at it, b) I got too caught up and, subsequently, terrified by it and c) it was a big old time sink. Time I could spend hitting refresh on the internet.

Largely if I turn to computers as a hobby it’s to program, though I haven’t done much of that in about three years. I’d forgotten the tiny thrill of problem solving. My son (Nathan, who’s 8) is really interested in programming, though he lacks the patience to really understand it just yet – but he’s very keen that I teach him / do something cool. Mostly though, he wants to develop mods in minecraft (I’d say we’re a ways off from that.)

Anyhue, that’s it. I don’t play games. Mostly because I was rubbish at them.

This is what happens when you blink. Over a fortnight passes. One of the reasons I was trying to blog daily was to inject a bit of discipline back into the art – how does that work? Well, it probably doesn’t, but I know that when I’m being super productive in the art, I’m blogging and tweeting like a madman (because it’s a totally different function from drawing). And when the art starts to slip away from me, the tweets and blog posts similarly start to disappear (partly out of guilt, partly because I’ve nothing to say).

So, I figured, let’s flip that. If I start blogging every day, then may… just maybe… that act will kickstart a super productive drawing sessions.

It worked (or maybe it didn’t work) and then I stopped blogging and then I… well, let’s just say the last 6 pages have taken 16 pages to draw.

Anyhue, let’s get back to daily blogging and we’ll take it from there.

Oh, if you’re an imagine fx subscriber, you’ll find an article I wrote about drawing using Manga Studio – in order to do it, I had to write a single page mini future shock style story (it’s a little bit of fluff, but I needed something… now I wish I’d drawn a giant robot monster story… bah). Anyhue, I drew it once, hated it utterly and then drew it again. Here’s the only bit of that page that I liked… (I actually videoed the process of the page I hated to, so in a few months I might put that online, if I can stand it…)

Yippie Kay Yay muther fupper.

So, following the blog post this morning, and thank you to every one who commented on twitter or elsewhere (in the old days, a blog post like that would’ve seen a bunch of comments, now all the dialogue happens within twitter) just a quick follow up really: turns out the school letter wasn’t as dramatic as it read. A little miss communication at the school, and while Nathan’s behaviour was bad (his behaviour seems to flare up sometimes, it remains to be seen whether that’s a random occurrence or entirely predictable based on diet or some other factor) every one at the school was keen for him to stay on and do the class – as he clearly enjoys it. Nathan was reticent though, worried that he’d be disruptive again and be thrown out of the jujitsu altogether (he has very bad impulse control and where another child would raise their hand before speaking he will often blurt things out, and if it’s not something you’re prepared for it’s easy to see how you’d think this was a deliberate disruptive behaviour). As it turns out he was a model child today -thankfully – given him a chance to show that a) he CAN be well behaved and b) he isn’t going to lose out on an after school group because of something he can’t help.

We’re going to try and work on the impulse control a little; I’ll be doing a little q&a session, 1:1 with him in the mornings to see if I can’t get him to control it a little. (We did that this morning, and, he blurted things out “Daddy, it’s your fault, the questions are too interesting”.)

We’ve been told to apply for DLA for Nathan, and I’m reticent to do so, and exploring that, I think it’s because it’s an absolute admission that there’s something wrong, and I don’t really want to accept that. But the DLA opens up other things, unlocking other benefits which I know would be good for Nathan and us.

I’ll probably blog more about this as I fumble through it, it won’t mean a change of focus on the blog, but it’s a nice release valve for me and gives me the chance to work out what it is I’m really thinking. Nathan has no real awareness of the ASD diagnosis and I’d like it to stay that way, which may be impossible if I blog here about it, so, at some point, I may go back and delete or move these entries to somewhere else.

Again, thanks for all the notes of support.