Usually, I’ll try and do this before a thing sees print, but, of course, the nature of print means once it’s printed it’s done.

Here’s a reprise on the Dredd Wolf pic. The original and edit…

So, the only real difference is a punched up the size of Dredd. He’s bloody massive now, but the flat, dark red colouring keeps him recessed – he’s not as front and centre as a b&w image would be. He better frames the wolves behind him and we’re more engaged with what’s happening – we’re pulled much much closer to the action, and the threat feels more real.

Basically we’ve turbo injected the original idea.

Not sure why I didn’t spot that easy of a fix, I suspect I was still thinking of it in B&W rather than colour. I’ve created a mock up of how the b&w might have looked, and it’s clear in b&w at least, your focus is drawn ENTIRELY to dredd. The wolves in the bg get a secondary glance. The big block of pure b&w draws your eye, and the many lines of the wolf merge to a grey in your vision.

Story telling is about figuring out where the focus needs to be for the image, and how to balance the various elements to tell that story. The b&w fails on that count, I think, but succeeds in the colour.

Something to file away for the next pin up I think.

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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I think the most successful colour work has really strong “values” (by which I mean the light/dark within the picture – ignoring the colour information) that you can read without colour – I’ve done a bit of colouring – not much, so I don’t count myself an expert in this field (I probably can talk about it better than I can do it) but in exporting the file I accidentally exported a greyscale version – basically values only and it’s interesting to see that it still reads. Here the background is a bit dull, but that probably pushes more focus on the face.

Really happy with the shapes- drawn without reference  but keeping in mind what Bruce Timm did interpreting early Jack Kirby. That’s my kind of monster.

I’m hoping to pitch a big monster story to a publisher (good chance) and I would love to push and pull these kind of features…

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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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!).