Drawing a Crowd

Some people have imagination to burn, NOT ME! so, when required to draw a crowd, I’ll stick something on tv and liberally steal from every extra that walks past. Right now I’m catching up on Servant which means M Night Shymalan makes an appearance (well, not really, I’m not going for likenesses just INPUT for my imagination engines to latch on to.)

Love is Forever

There are three things I wanted to do – one I wanted to see how much story I could pack in to a one page story, I’ve been thinking about stories about love and unrequited love (specifically the deep gothic love stories, Dracula/Mina Harker, Conor MacCloud and Heather…) and I had a new brush from frenden I hadn’t used yet that I thought would be fun.

Having done the folklore stories, I knew I could tell a tale in that space, but could I come up with one of my own?

I wasn’t entirely sure where I was going with it, initially it was just going to be an old man visiting the grave of his wife, then it occurred to me I could give a bit of a twist – visiting the grave of his first love. Hard to know where poignancy ends and creepiness begins though, but that’s ok, a story this short you can read what you want in to it – did he live a decent life, got married, have kids, all the while that first love was just a part of him, or did he lament the loss for the entirety of his life? we’ll never know.

I’ve uploaded a high res tiff file in case you fancy colouring it – and if you do, drop a note in the comments, I’d love to see it!

Holiday Comics 2012

A few years ago, while on holiday in Rathmullan (remember holidays?) I decided to try and do some daily comic stripping – and so I did (well, for a couple of days at least). And so here they are. They’re from 2012, when things gosh — when things were so much simpler.

No, I have no idea what I was inking with – I forgot to draw it. Probably a brush.

Watched a lot of Son’s of Anarchy.

Up to a point…

Crafted an entirely new creator owned action adventure series about librarians…

Tried a bit of Simple RPGaming with my son, by asking him to design a guy to fight me, it did not go well.

The 2012 Olympics, back then, the most dystopian thing I could imagine was the fact the Olympics wouldn’t allow not-Olympic funders to show their brand name. Oh sweet summer child.

And finally, Tabitha Devine, dark Gothic Mistress – which made me laugh if nothing else.

You know, for strips I spent half an hour or so on, they aren’t actually too bad. A bit of silly fun. Hope you like ’em!

Folklore Thursday: Shoe

Folklore Thursday: Shoe.

You can support John and I creating more of these comics at: patreon.com/holdenreppion

Phew, just under the wire.

Every piece of art now is an act of defiance. A defiance of the invisible enemy which is both unstoppable and imminently beatable. Patience and cleanliness. Seem to be key.

So as long as John is able to supply me with folkloric tweets, I will supply you with comics. Even if this weeks (and last weeks, I admit) are more just illustrations.

The shoe here is based a little loosely on Van Gough’s shoe (here https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436533) 

As I once said on twitter, I’m clearly better than Van Gough because he never sold any work and I can keep my glasses on. (This was, of course, entirely a joke)

How to represent malign forces though? well, I grew up on British Boys comics where a stinky old shoe would have pong lines coming from it, so I played with adding a little green odor to the shoe, but it cut across it look like a proper painting (though I admit, there’s still a tint of greeny pong on the shoe if you look). But I switched to using it to represent a malign force. Creating a layer with a claw shaped mask in clip studio, then spraying a colour on that layer give me plenty of scope to experiment and move it around. 

Hope it works, next week, I’m determined to draw a more meaty comic. But well, we’ll see – it’s been a weird month.

Dredd Chrysalids page 6

And there we have it. I’m gonna blog an almost redundant post after this one, that just puts all six pages together (including corrections I’ve done along the way – mostly minor things, but they all count). In the end, I’m fairly happy with it. Esp that last panel, it feels right to me. I might be wrong, but you know, whatcha gonna do?

I’d sent the script to a number of writer friends, back when I’d harboured ideas of pitching it to Tharg, and I got two responses about that end: dredd shouldn’t lose, this feels like dredd losing and the other (from a dredd writer) I like that dredd loses.

In the end, my gut tells me the ending with Dredd forgetting is the one that works.

I’ll post the script in a few days so you can see how much I varied it after the fact.

“But, PJ, Why DIDN’T you submit it to Tharg?”

Well, reader, I’ll be honest, I didn’t feel I had the chops neccessary to get a Dredd script accepted – even if it was brilliant (which I might not be, I dunno…) it felt like I needed to write a bunch of stories – of any sort – before I could expect to waste Matt’s time with a read of my script. Esp since I’m only playing at being a writer, I may never write again (though, maybe — I’ve two other Dredd story ideas that, like this one, have sat in the back of my brain for a long time, that maybe could do with a spit and a polish and some pencils… maybe NEXT christmas… we’ll see…)

Anyway, hope you liked it, please let me know – I’m not being paid for this, so the only positive I get is feedback…!

Now, on to the pencils and greywash…

Folklore Thursday: Mushroom

Blame me for the titles. John writes a tweet, I supply a title, it was ever thus (in er.. the five weeks we’ve been doing this).

Fairy Rings are circles of mushrooms often seen in fields and woodlands across Europe. They mark the meeting, and dancing, places of the Fae. If a human steps into one, they may glimpse the Little People. But bewitchment, ill fortune, and even death may follow. #folklorethursday

John Reppion via Twitter

I’ll be honest, I consider this one a failure on my part. (It’s neither modesty, nor fishing for praise, just honest assessment). I wanted it to work so badly. I’ve done some nice watercolour stuff in the past, but never a full strip. I thought if I can quickly pencil it and then water colour over it, it should be nice.

It wasn’t. It was.. at best.. a good start.

Compounding this, sadly, was the fairly barely adequate nature of my scanner. It’s important to know and understand the limits of the tools you use, and my faithful Brother DCP6690 has served me well for over a decade, scanning pencils and inks at A3 size, and printing pencils as bluelines on heavy bristol board (sometimes it spews that out and just refuses to play ball, but that’s ok – it owes me nothing). Unfortunately it’s bloody awful for colour. Scanning colour is a serious art in itself. Even if your scanner scans a true and accurate reflection of the art (which is unlikely as the scanner’s light casts a sickly blue light, which is why blue line printing can be easily dismissed by the scanner – it’s practically invisible in the bluewhite light. ) then you’re faced with whether your computer monitor is set up in a way that can accurately show you those colours on screen. Plus the art software (in this case clip studio) may decide to preview it for print and give it a slightly different hue. It’s all a nightmare.

Part of the remit though, is to do these things quickly, so I don’t really have the luxury of going back and reworking (though in this case, I DID) or fiddling with colours when scanned and I wrestled with it, and I thought – better to put out a heroic failure, than to cowardly revert to type and do it again in b&w with digital colours (also I was too lazy)

And one thing I learned while acting is… nobody knows about mistakes until you tell them. So ignore everything I’ve said here and assume this strip is exactly what I meant it to be.

(No pencils on this one, as it was pencilled and coloured in one go)

Mum

I wrote and drew this comic strip in October last year. It tumbled out of me too quickly. It deals with losing a parent, and it seems to have moved a number of people who read it when it was on twitter (and my blog previously, though my blog has since been wiped and reset)

And so, here it is, I hope you like it.

Channel Hex: Planet of the Blind

Reminder: this isn’t the final work, the final work will be an entirely different story. This is just me trying to figure out some stuff about logos/layouts/page sizes/etc.

Anyway, last time on Channel Hex, I’d planned on a commando digest size and now I’m skewing more towards a slightly larger italian digets sized – art would still be A4, but those books tend more towards 4-5 panels per page rather than 2 (ultimately it may be between 3-4) so I drew a page of the imaginary story (aren’t they all) of Planet of the Blind, and dumped some logos on there. Thanks to my pal, Jim Lavery – who put up with me doggedly asking him to help me design a logo even though I’d clearly had exactly what I wanted in mind already – who suggested a font choice that works great. So I mocked up a single page of the comic, and here it is:

There’s a little too many logos on that page, I don’t think the smaller hex-tentacle logo works at all, and maybe, on that first page i don’t need the logos at all (though the temptation to use the hexagram as a 2000ad style credits in the strip is almost overpowering.)

I’ve a colourist friend has promised to colour up the cover, so once that’s done I’ll repost it with logos/etc.

I’m keeping the actual story under wraps – it’s a corker, and exactly the sort of thing I’d enjoy, fingers crossed when the kickstarter happens (and I’m working at timing now, a tricker thing that you’d think) then you’ll hear all about it on my mailing list at Channel Hex.

Tiers of a Starblazer

So been thinking some more on the idea of a digest style comic on kickstarter and what sort of tiers I could do, and again, very open to ideas/thoughts on this. It’s not the sort of thing I want to leap in to without thinking about a great deal first.

There’s a lot to be said for the idea of one single price for one single product (Keep it Simple, Stupid) but then there’s a few fun things you can do on a kickstarter, so here’s some notions – not final ideas, not final prices, just … starting points…

There’s (obviously) a digital comic tier – £1 – a pdf download.
At some point, any comic like this I’d want to look at getting on comixology, but probably for something like £2.50

A Softback Print comic – I’d like to charge £5-£10 for a softback. Not sure how practical that is, but it’s something I’d be comfortable paying for a comic.

A Hardback Print comic – probably around £10-£15

A Portfolio edition – hardback plus a set of prints, from some other industry pros (maybe?)- in a nice little envelope? £ 35 – 50 – 100? (Depending on who I get to rope in and whether I want to make this really limited?)

Broadly speaking I think you’d divide original art into three levels: full page (A), title character page (B), other page (C)

Original Art – one hardback plus a page of C art – £35

Original Art – one hardback plus a page of B art – £50

Original Art – one hardback plus a page of A art – £100

(Again, KISS though – maybe just one Original Art tier at £50 to cover any random page?)

And I think that’s it. All copies signed, obviously. I’ve seen other artists offer sketches or other things to be done, but I think that really skews the amount of work required -and I’d like the book completed before kickstarting (so the idea of adding people if they pay to be in it is a bit .. not for me) I’d like to do the book and then fund the printing and and creation of it. What I don’t want to do is become obliged to do more work (I mean, there will be more work – signing them all and sorting them and posting…)

Another thing I think you need to consider with kickstarter are stretch goals – but I’ll think about that another day…