PJ Holden's Blog

When John McCrea told me he was writing a sequel to the Judge Dredd white werewolf story, I pretty much forced him to accept a pin up for it. 

The Cry of the Werewolf was one of those defining moments in comics for me, even now it tingles my spin thinking about it. Steve Dillon, werewolves, Dredd? A perfect blend of awesome stuff.

I was lucky enough to meet Steve a few times, the first when I was in my early 20s or so, in Belfast. He was a guest at The Talisman comic shop (later to become Forbidden Planet) and because I knew all the guys they invited me out for a drink. We went to the Empire in Belfast.

Steve, was, Steve. A funny, warm guy with lots of great stories. He told us about drawing the wolves in that story one hot summer in London (later on I found out he was living with Jerry Paris at the time, famous for C&VG and Bug Hunters).

I told Steve I wasn’t much of a drinker. “Oh” he said “You’ll have to learn if you want to be a comic artist”.

Second time I met Steve was in New York, decades later and only a few years ago. He was drinking with Garth. I’d everything with me to head off to my flight that was due to depart in a few hours.

“Hey”, Steve leaned in, “he’s trying to get you drunk, you better make your excuses and head off!”

Steve’s untimely death, came I think, when his artwork was actually reaching new heights. For an artist as naturally gifted as Steve (working professionally from the age of 16!) it would have been easy to sit back and let your experience drift you along, but the recent punisher work he’d been doing felt like an artist pushing themselves further.

John’s story and my pin up offer happened before Steve’s death. Work went on and Steve left a hole in comics, and it felt more important to me personally to contribute a pin up.

Here’s some of the background stuff to that. 

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Hey, hope you liked this post. Posts like this will only be available to Patroens with Back Stage Passes from Thursday, if you’re one of the early birds you can get a back stage pass for $5 – first 25 people only! After that it’s $10 for the same thing. I’ll be posting about story telling, using Clip Studio Paint as well as layouts and thumbnails for lots of projects. Come join me! (And if you’re already signed up – you crafty bugger!)

The excellent Tom Rainey drew a picture of Modok and like a thieving weasel I downloaded it and coloured it.

A quick Clip Studio Paint Sketch (15-20minutes?) drawn using some of Frenden’s natural media tools. Sort of Bruce Timm/Kirby inspired.

This is from Hunted Series 2, episode 4 

Inks were a frustration for me, popping between digital and pencil. I think they look better than I felt about them at the time, but that’s sometimes the way it goes.

I tend to pencil multiple pages before I start inking them, a habit picked up a few years ago doing a Garth Ennis Battlefields book that required approvals on the pencils and then inks, before then I’d’ve inked panel by panel (I should probably go back to that, it feels like you’re more intimately involved in the drawing process, pencils then inks pushes you further away from the feel of drawing a page).

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Starting next week, these sorts of backstage things will be behind the patreon paywall! If you’d like to see them for the ultra low price of $5 per month, sign up quick!

If you’re a Clip Studio Paint (formerly Manga Studio) user you may have encountered Frenden before – he has a range of brush tools for Manga Studio (and I really recommend picking them all up, but at a minimum the pencils. And the inks. And the paint ones. Oh heck, get them all).

One problem is, though, that there are – at the latest count, 450 different brush/pencil/paint tools. 

Which is a lot.

Now, I’ve always been a proponent of the school of one-size-fits all. Pick your inking tool and stick with it. 

On analogue the best one-size-fits all tool is a brush. If you use a dip pen you’ll either end up doing very scratchy inking (and maybe using a brush to fill large areas of black) or you’ll be mixing and matching tools – which tends to slow you down.

On digital, even though you can have lots of faux brush tools, I still find that you need a few different tools to get all the lines you might want. 

Somewhere in that 450 toolset are the perfect three that will do everything you want.

Here’s what I’d do, once you’ve imported them (following the instructions) create a nice new blank document and then go through each tool one at a time. When you find a tool you like drag the tool up to a blank area in the subtool settings, this will create a new list of subtools including just that one brush.

(Just click and hold the brush you want to move, then move it to the area that’s blank – I’ve labelled the area in the above image)

There it is added – I dragged the Sumi brush up and now I have a new group of subtools called “Sumi” containing just the sumi brush.

Right clicking the name of the subgroup gives me the “Settings of sub tool group…” option – really a slightly overlong way to say “Change name of group”

And I can change the name to ‘Favs’

And I can repeat the process, dragging out every single brush tool that I like in to the favs, quickly burning through 450 brushes to get to the half a dozen or so that I like.

And that’s it. I intend to do far more stuff on Clip Studio Paint in the future, including revisiting old articles I wrote for ImagineFX as well as old blog posts that are sadly long gone and new things. 

If you’d like to read these and other deep dives into comics and storytelling, sign up for the backstage pass! There’s 25 EARLY BIRD patreon passes available at $5 and once they go, it’s $10 (I’m a monster, i know!). 

I generally don’t do the crunch thing. That is: last minute deadline work ’til you drop.

Partly it’s because I’ve always been pretty fast – whether that’s down to my art style or laziness I guess we’ll never know. I have a set tempo I work at and that’s it. My lines come out at that speed.

My speed also doesn’t reflect the quality of the work – that’s an entirely separate metric, I’ve done amazing work fast and terrible work slowly (in fact, more often than not that’s how it goes). I’ve also often poured much more effort in to work that is later described as lazy than work which people are just aghast at the detail (that work I usually do on the phone on autopilot – as long as I have the structural points right the rest is just a kind of intense phone doodle).

Actually, let me address the elephant in the room that you won’t be able to see because, really, it’s my particular elephant.

If you describe an artist as lazy without knowing them or their work ethic and spending the time with them when they did the work – then you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.

If you describe an artist as only putting a few hours or minutes in to a page without knowing exactly how much time they spent on the work – then you’re showing yourself as entirely ignorant and again you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.

If you call an artist lazy because he’s drawn 45 pages in a month and you’ve not seen those pages so don’t actually know how good or bad he is? You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.

(And guess what? those two months where I drew 49 and then 45 pages? some of the best work of my career. The following month, where I drew 6 pages? some of the worst.)

I’ve drawn three amazing pages in one day, and drawn some frightful pages that have taken upwards of 10 days to complete.

Maybe for some it’s a very simple equation of time=effort=quality. But for most artists it’s really not.

God, I wish it was that simple though.

The reality is, when you make your money drawing comics, sometimes your “talent” is the ability to finish a page even though you hate every line you draw.

Sometimes the talent is just keeping your head down and moving on even when every part of you screams “I hate myself, why am I doing this?”

It’s not fun, but that’s the job.

Anyway, my point.

I crunched last night, worked til 3am, on stuff which I quite like actually (TANKS! EXPLOSIONS! WWII!) and now I’m just a hollow husk of a man, no point doing anything. Too tired.

I won’t be crunching again.