PJ Holden's Blog

The process of creating a cover for a book is pretty different to comics. In comics, you do some roughs, send to an editor, get an approval and boom! cover done! In books… horrifically more complicated. Graphic designers get involved and the, ultimately, decided to take some art from inside the pages I’d drawn and use that. So, here’s one of the cover roughs I sent before I knew that was the process. Slightly cliched, but that’s fine. Coulda worked.

There’s something a bit odd how I frequently find myself landing gigs I’d wanted, but only after three other people (or two in this case) had already had a go. Anyways, this is a fun/ easy gig so should be no problem doing this until they kick me off the gig, which I hope they never will.

This is the entire first episode, I hear it printed horribly – the colours so dark a lot of the line art got lost, so I have no qualms popping this up here. Shame though, hopefully we’ll get it right next time!

Here’s my computer setup for work.

Acer Asus 4k 27″ Monitor (which I can show 3 roughly print sized pages on across ways) cost: £179 (I think I picked this up as a bargain, it was the last of two of these in curry’s and they were discontinued, the newer one I think was about £230 or something)

Huion 16″ I picked that up for around £300 (Actually it might’ve been £269?) absoloute bargain at either price. I’d buy another of these in a heartbeat. 

Even when I had the massive 27″ Cintiq, I’d usually split the screen in two, in the left I’d show the full sized page and on the right I’d show a zoomed in area I was working on. The Huion is capable of the same but there’s not enough real estate there realistically, so instead this double screen set up is perfect.

Both powered by a Mac M1 Mini, the new M2 Mac Mini starts around £649 (8Gb RAm, 256Gb HD) – I’d probably go to the £1049 model (16Gb Ram, 512Gb HD) the mac isn’t upgradeable, and while my current setup is 8Gb/512Gb I do slightly regret not getting more ram (not that it’s ever hampered me, mind you, it runs fast enough for everything I do)

Updated to add: I forgot, the mac doesn’t come with keyboard or mouse, so I’ve a logitech wireless mouse (about £20?) and a really lovely, took-me-ages-to-finally-pull-the-trigger keychron keyboard, that was about £69(!) yes, I know. But it’s super small footprint, the keys are bright white (though it has an irratatingly large selection of how the keyboard lights work – I mean keyboard lights that dance around while you’re using it, I just want them on or off!) and they have a chunky nice feel when you use them. Plus it’s wired OR wireless, I use it wired just to keep the lights on all the time. (And you have three bluetooth connections you can choose from if you like).

Connected to all of that is a Brother DCP6690CW – which I think I bought 10-15 years ago? An A3 scanner/inkjet printer. Anwyay, it was around £260 and I use whatever rubbish ink cartridges I can find cheap and it works great for everything I do – scanning lineart, and printing blueline for inking. (though a more modern one would work a bit nicer on the network and I could print/scan to an iphone) That said I don’t actually ink this way anymore, so I’ve got it on hand JUST IN CASE.

Second printer is a Brother HL2350DCP laser printer, I use this for printing scripts and the odd comic, it’s A4 and can print double sided so good for silly fun projects.

Software wise: Clip Studio Pro Ex ver 1.13 (Latest version 1). There’s a version 2 coming soon, I’m not sure it has any features I want/need, but my old computer head will kick in and I’ll probably upgrade. 

For scripts/editing, I’ll usually turn to Pages – which is Apple’s word processor and free with the mac. Word compatible so good enough for most things. Though I am tempted to get Scrivener for comic scripting, which is about £50.

Phew, whatta week. Pencilled 1 page, inked 24. Good week. Good week. Bad Magic was announced, so you know, that’s good. I’m about 44 pages behind the ball on finishing it, if I have a month next month like this then I’ll have squared it away nicely. 

I’ve pencilled 47 pages this month, and I’ve got five pages of the current chapter of Bad Magic to ink, which COULD be done on Monday (I mean why not???)

Which will leave me with nothing left to do, until I get the next chapter and start some pencils, but it does mean I might have saved my reputation for delivering on time, since I;’d sort of blown it a bit on this book on account of life chucking massive great obstacles in my way…

Dunno if they’ll end up being used, but here’s some sketches for the folklore book that’s being collected…

We needed another page for the book, and specifically something selkie related, so John sent me a tweet and I turned it into a metaphor about the fleeting nature of tv fame… I dunno if that’s what anyone expected, but it’s certainly what I delivered!

This week I pencilled a somewhat staggering 27 pages. An entire chapter of Bad Magic (the graphic novel) and a six page strip. Next week is all inks.

Owing to the way the page count on bad magic has gone, I have to go back and add a couple of pages, doing that tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll be going back and adding an extra page (see it exclusively here first!) to the folklore thursday stuff as it’s being collected into a nice volume of stuff. (also gotta to reletter it)

Weekends/job ends are like speed bumps, give mea  straight week of doing inks or pencils and I take off like a plane. Once things get bitty and complicated, it slows me right down. 

Here’s a non spoiler page, and pretty typical for how detailed my pencils are. I mean it’s all I need to go in with inks.

Saw John McCrea at the weekend, along with some of his dead eyes art (which is beautiful, I like John’s work anyway but this stuff is something else again).

Anyway, expect some inks next week!

This is the last page of the leopard from lime street ep8 – a particualrly tricky one to figure out the layout for, two things I’d like to see in BIG panels, and then two sort of end panels. I think, in the end what I got worked – but largely because you can get away with goofy circular panels in this sort of thing (where they’d be out of place in, for example, a war book)

Anyway, there’s what the layout looks like, I actually really like the composition on the page now.

A couple of years ago, Keith Richards -editor of Monster Fun- tasked me with repbooting a strip from the old monster fun for a one off brand new monster fun. I really enjoyed doing it, but I suspect while the comic seemed to get a chance at life, the strip didn’t (or at least we weren’t asked to do more…)

Anyway. just for us, here it is! 

If you think of my artwork as cartoony, this is proper cartooning… and I got a chance to do some paid work with John Reppion…

So, in total, this week I pencilled five pages and inked 11 – so you could think of that as the equivalent of 16 half pages or 8 pages of finished art in total this week. A decent haul, but actually Friday I only inked one page, and didn’t do much else and saturday I did some layouts for the next episode of Leopard of Lime street, but not much else and today I’m started the 21 pages of layouts for the next chapter of Skulduggery Pleasant… but not much else.

So three pretty lazy days in there, which is annoying. 

Doing layouts tonight with a plan of just powering through as many pages of pencils as I can all next week. 

Above – leopard from Lime street layouts

One of the 8 inked pages.

I also drafted a first draft for tango, I’m gonna pitch that in film school tomorrow night, we’ll see how it goes down.