Pye Parr - Art and design blog

DEATH PLANET! plus: Avert Disaster Today!

2012-01-26T21:53:00.000Z

DEATH PLANET! This is a cover I finished today for the graphic novel that gets bagged with the Megazine each month. Next issue it's reprinting DEATH PLANET (it needs to be written in caps) by Alan Hebden and Lopez, and as it never had a cover when originally printed Tharg asked asked me to draw one. His brief was something like 'a planet dripping blood' but I went to town and made it look like an old video nasty instead. I have to admit it doesn't have much to do with the strip itself, but it's a pretty cool image. I came up with the crappy tagline myself, so this will almost certainly get ditched on the print job. Below are a couple of rough I did beforehand.

Ages ago Robo-k33f and I came up up with a fun idea for a subscriptions advert in 2000 AD that would read more like a propaganda poster than a sales pitch, involving whole planets getting leveled and blown up for daring to cancel their weekly Prog.
I think Tharg kind of liked the idea, so I came up with something a bit more concrete one afternoon, complete with ridiculous small-print and condescending tone. Unfortunately actually doing the art and getting it finished proved a little harder to fit in, but after a few months of putting it off it was printed in the Prog 2012 Christmas special. It'll also get tweaked a little bit to run in the special Free Comic Book Day 2000 AD issue in the US.
Below is the art without stuff on, and below that my pencils.

Frogmen vs. Dogmen! This is something I've wanted to draw for ages, for no reason other than it would be violent, and cool. It's a titanic struggle of the ages that my dog seems intent on continuing in my back garden. It's time frogs got their own back.

Although this goes unmentioned in the advert, the purple blob in the background is called 'Thangar Void-Eater' and is named after a weird bloke we saw wandering round a convention one year. At the time we were bored out of our minds, suffering badly from stuck-behind-a table-madness and were passing the time by making up fantasy back-stories for the strange people that were walking around. It's probably worth saying he looked nothing like this in reality.

Pretty much the perfect way I'd like to read 2000 AD each week: in a tatty old armchair with tea and biscuits. And gin. The dog is based on Baz, my insane Paterdale Terrier. Also, I don't know if anyone will notice this but Tharg is peering over the fence in the background. I thought about having him stood behind the Squaxx with his hand on his shoulder in a paternal way, but I thought instead I'd make him leer like a sex-pest from behind a hedge.

Various stages of the SalesBot character. I came up with a great pun for his name, and was gonna write it on his head, but I can't for the life of me remember it, so he stays nameless. For now let's call this pink cretin Molch-R.

In the spirit of the advert: Click here to subscribe to 2000 AD - your species depends on you!

Pax Omega (again, sorry)

2012-01-06T19:11:00.000Z

We sent Al Ewing's Pax Omega off to press this morning. Here is the final cover design and a few spreads from the interior pages, which I spent a bit longer on than I would do normally. On the cover, as well as adding in all the correct copy, I redesigned the spine, and made a ton of small adjustments to the art at the last minute (I couldn't help myself) that I doubt anyone but me will notice...

Time's Arrow: Black Swan. Work-in-progress!

2012-01-05T22:14:00.000Z

This is an ebook cover I've been working on for Abaddon, the cover for the second volume of Jon Green's Times Arrow. Above is the work-in-progress colouring, which at the moment is just the pencil drawing multiplied over a layer of colour. I'll have to go back and finish this at a later date, but I want the colours to be similar in tone to that of volume one. Below is the thumbnail I drew before starting, and the teaser design I did a while ago for the back of volume one, which owes more to the design of Pax Omega than the usual Pax Britannia style.

This whole project is pretty cool, and a bit of an experiment. Time's Arrow is getting published in three volumes as ebooks, and between the release of each one the readers will be able to vote for what happens in the next installment!
The first part, Times Arrow: Red Handed, is available now, and Black Swan will be on sale in a month or so.

Find out more here!

CaB

2012-01-05T22:13:00.000Z

Last year Luke and I worked on several (quite varied) projects for Cab Studios. Below is a selection of some of images I produced for them.

THINK

TEAMSPORT KARTING T-SHIRT CONCEPTS

XMAS CARDS

Judge Dredd vs Zombies!

2011-12-02T12:14:00.001Z

The Law comes to the iPad and iPhone in the Lawman of the Future's first ever iOS game: Judge Dredd vs. Zombies!

Even though the 2000 AD Nerve Centre shares an office with the computer games side of Rebellion, I had no real knowledge (other than sneakily glancing at programmers screens whilst wandering around) of the the newly released Judge Dredd vs Zombies, up until about 3 weeks ago - and now I don't seem to have done much else!

I was approached at first to come up with an alternative icon for use on the App Store, as the version the games dudes had been using during production didn't really tell you much about the game. I think it was just a Judge's badge on a blue background or something. They wanted something very simple and very graphic that would suggest both the Dredd and zombie elements, and still be recognizable when reduced in size. The picture below is the first thing I came up with, based on the mask graphic that we use on the Judge Dredd Case Files books.

Image-wise I still think this is kinda cool, but I do agree with the feedback we received from Fuse Powered (who Rebellion were creating the game with) that it doesn't really give the impression of there being a hero in the game, or a versus element. To people not familiar with Dredd it could just be a zombie in an american football helmet or something.

It was suggested instead I do some kind of fight scene with Dredd fighting a horde of the undead. I wasn't so sure about this really - for a start Dredd facing off a horde of zombies is exactly what we were trying to avoid with the first graphic, it's not a graphic anymore its an illustration, plus the minimum size the icon would be displayed at is something like 50x50px, so it would run the risk of being completely unintelligible.

Anyway below are 3 rough pictures I did for this. The top one I spent more time over (too much really, I put loads of pointless detail into the zombie faces), before deciding that it really, really needed to be simplified. I scrapped it and quickly knocked out the other 2 pictures. I did all of these in Adobe Illustrator so it was pretty easy to rearrange the bits.

After seeing these everyone decided that although they kind of liked them as images in their own right, they were far too busy and wouldn't be very clear when reduced in size on the App Store...

At this point I did what I should have done in the first place and did a very quick page of sketches, then got everyone involved to choose a favourite. Number 5 is the one we went with. Here's the final icon:

Next up is the advert I put together with some help from PR-bot Molch-R for the game that'll be in next weeks 2000 AD (Prog 1763). As I'd kind of set a style for the game at this point I ended up doing all the web banners and itunes store graphics too at the last minute! There was about 35 of them and it was right up to the wire. The game went live today I think, and I only finished them yesterday afternoon!

The only thing left for me now is to play the bloody game! It looks great, but I think I've played it for the grand total of about 15 seconds! If you want to have a go too, here's the link, It's only 69p too.
Would seem tight of me to ask for a complimentary copy?

Double Dead Advertising

2011-11-02T17:29:00.002Z

Press and web adverts for Double Dead, for 2000 AD and the Abaddon website respectively.

2000 AD/Rebellion Design Stuff

2011-10-31T17:23:00.000Z

I don't ever really bother putting anything on here about the design work I do at Rebellion, so here's a few of the more interesting things I've done recently. Most of my time day-to-day is taken up with the design and production of 2000 AD, the Megazine, Graphic Novels and the Solaris and Abaddon books, but I always enjoy working on stuff that's a bit different.

First off is the 'manga-sized' Dredd graphic novels we're putting out. 'Manga-sized' actually means 'B' format, which is a pretty standard UK novel size (128x198mm). We did quite a few tests at different sizes to make sure that the speech bubbles where still readable and that the art looks as good as ever, and the B size seems just about right. Personally I would have prefered something slightly squarer so the art fitted larger on the page, but a custom page size would have cost much more to print and defeat the point of the smaller sized books (and would probably have only added 10mm on to the width of the art anyway) so it's a small quibble.
There's quite a few in the pipeline, but I can only show a couple of the covers at the moment. Really excited about them though. Like with the Case Files series it was good to present some classic stories in a new way. We wanted these to looks a bit more book-y than our usual GNs, so as not to immediately alienate people who wouldn't usually want to read a comic on the train or whatever. Hopefully we've done that.
The artwork on both of these editions is by Mick McMahon, definitely one of my favourite Dredd artists. It wasn't a conscious decision to use him on both covers, but his art just fit the space left by the design. I'm hoping to get a decent selection of the other Dredd artists on some of the later volumes.

This is a bit random: A recruitment campaign for Rebellion that's going in Develop Magazine and on their website. Usually jobs like this get banged out in 5 minutes flat as various deadlines are always looming, so it was nice to take a bit more time on one. Considering how much great concept/3D art we have floating round the office it's surprizingly hard to find pictures to use for this kind of thing, as very often any game in production is still top-secret, or licensed from a big company who'd take weeks to approve any artwork - hence these being entirely type-based.

Here are a couple of Judge Dredd 'in-world' logos I did a while ago that haven't been used for anything yet (although watch this space). Tons of stuff I do like this doesn't ever get to see the light of day, so here they are:

Below is a selection of some of the (many) character/story logos I've designed over the years for 2000 AD. The Zombo one is a personal favourite, but I'm happy with the Numbercruncher logo too.

Zombo created by Al Ewing & Henry Flint

Ichabod Azrael created by Rob Williams & Dom Reardon

Numbercruncher created (and owned) by Si Spurrer & PJ Holden

Indigo Prime created by John Smith & Chris Weston

(although this logo gets used on artwork by Edmund Bagwell)

Cursed Earth Koburn created by Gordon Rennie & Carlos Ezquerra

Samizdat Squad created by Arthur Wyatt & Paul Marshall

Lastly are some graphic novel cover designs. The Harlem Heroes book is based on the Team's kit from the story, and the ball and logo are lifted off the interior art. I've no idea who made the original Logo but I think it's great!

The Ichabod Azrael ones are concepts for a US edition to be released in 2012, but it's not yet confirmed and these may not get used. I quite like the block of text though. I did this in the same week as the Rebellion advert above. Can you tell?

The Pack

2011-10-21T21:40:00.000+01:00

Cover art I finished this week for a self-published ebook by Solaris Books' Ben Smith. It's a coming-of-age story about a young girl who... actually I don't want to spoil it. It's out in November anyway, and when he sends me a proper blurb and a link to Amazon I'll stick it up!

This was a really nice little job to do, and as Ben can testify, I liked it so much I took several months to get round to finishing it...

Pax Omega Cover Art

2011-09-09T18:31:00.000+01:00

Finally finished the cover art for Al Ewing's 3rd book in the Pax Britannia series; PAX OMEGA.
Really pleased with this. Back cover below:

...and a rough idea of what the final design will look like. It needs some proper text, and the spine isn't finished yet but you get the idea!

Didn't really do and sketches or preparatory work for this one, as I had a fairly clear idea in my head of what I wanted it to look like, but I ran out of steam about half way through when it came to filling the bottom of the page. Below are my 3 main ideas of what to fill the space with. The 3rd 'thunderbolt' one is clearly the best, but I didn't particularly like duplication of the city skyline so Al suggested a chess theme. I thought this was a genius idea it and fitted in perfectly with the really graphic style of the rest of the cover.

This one's been pretty tough to be honest. This version of the cover has come together really quickly and easily over the last 2 days, and I'm very happy with how it turned out, but I only started it because my original picture just wasn't working. I've spent days and days over the last few months in a frustrated self-doubting nightmare, desperately trying to make it as good as I wanted it to be. I must have re-drawn the main Doc Thunder character at least 3 times, and completely restarted the colouring at one point. Of course, the longer I spent on it, the harder it was to throw away and start again, but in the end I just couldn't face working on it ever again and decided to start from scratch. Not an easy decision to make!

Below are my sketches for the original cover, and the final image as far as I got with it. None of the main characters are properly painted, but I'm still pleased with the colouring and lighting on the Masterbrain (big robot)'s brass head and copper belly. All the planets and lightning in the background are ok too. I think the main problem with this picture is focus really. i.e. there isn't one. There's just so much going on you don't know what to look at, and I've pretty much used every colour there is, so nothing stands out. I think the tipping point for me was looking at it and thinking 'Would I buy a book with this on the cover?'. When the answer was 'No.' it was pretty hard to carry on.

On the pencils you can see some of the changes I made. Doc Thunder is totally different, I completely removed El Sombra and the hazmat-suited scientists (they're pretty small at the bottom) and the Masterbrain's brass head used to resemble a much loved star of the silent screen (also Hitler).

Final Cover Art and Design for Double Dead, Solaris Rising and Time's Arrow!

2011-09-06T01:15:00.000+01:00

Finished quite a few covers recently, two of which I started probably a year ago but have only just got to send to press. First is Chuck Wendig's Double Dead for Abaddon Books, which I changed quite a lot from my original rough (check that out here). I redrew Coburn, the main character at the top and decided it needed some explanation for the Double in the title so added a load of zombies at the bottom. I always intended to do this but they're quite different to how I thought I'd do it. I was thinking grey shambling silhouettes at the bottom of the image to start with, but green mouldy faces are much more fun!

The art without coverlines:

I also finished the cover for Solaris Rising, a new science-fiction anthology from Solaris edited by Ian Whates, which went to the printers on the same day as Double Dead by a weird coincidence. Unlike that though the cover art hasn't changed at all from my original go at (which is a rarity for me - I have trouble leaving things alone), but I finally got to add all the cover text on top which I'm pleased with - it fits quite nicely I think and makes the whole thing look a bit cooler.

Lastly a preview of a forthcoming eBook from Abaddon called Time's Arrow, written by Jonathan Green. This will be the first of three covers for this book, which will be released in installments over a few months ( I think). Covers for volumes 2 & 3 coming soon (ish)...

On the left are the pencils for the above image, and right a page from my sketchbook of some designs for Le Papillon, the French Terrorist who appears in the story.

Lunchtime sketching

2011-08-24T00:49:00.000+01:00

A sketch I did on my lunchbreak today and just roughly coloured.

Trying to come up with a cool looking update to Dirk Danger's uniform - mainly as I have a new story to draw and (I hope) I'm quite a lot better now than when I came up with his original look. Don't want to change him too drastically, just needs some detail really. And a jet pack.

Gonna try some more tomorrow.

Random Illustration

2011-08-15T22:13:00.000+01:00

Some stuff I've done (kind of) recently. The 3 bottom pics where shown recently on Scotch Corner, but I've included the pencils sketches here too. The picture above was intended to be black and white, but i just quickly coloured it up as a test about 30 minutes ago before uploading it. I drew the pencils for the ork biker about 2 years ago now, but I needed something to colour when i was experimenting a bit the other day so it got reused!

Regicide

2011-06-24T17:34:00.000+01:00

Finshed cover art for the US (above) and UK (below) editions of Regicide by Nicholas Royle. I had to do a second cover for the US as it's being sold in as Horror in the states rather than General Fiction, and the distributors wanted a cover to reflect that. The UK one will hopefully have a gold foil printed over the white areas, which I can't wait to see when it gets printed!

Below are some of the pieces of art I drew with some indian ink and a dip pen for use in the photoshop files I made for the cover art. I was deliberately pretty messy in some places (if I keep telling myself this I might believe it one day) so everything looks very battered and old. They look pretty different from the finished pieces, and are quite cool in their own right really. I'm particularly pleased with the fanned out maze patterns, To make them I made my self a circular grid in illustrator then printed it out at 25% cyan and just made up the lines as i went along. You can still see the gris on the scan. If I ever get time I'd like to go back and fill up a whole circle with this stuff.

Lastly is a preview of the jacket design. I took the backgrounds from the files from the covers to use for the spines and back cover texture. This is the good thing about doing both the art and design for a book, normally I wouldnt have the artists layered files to muck about with, which makes matching the rest of the jacket design to the cover art a bit harder.

FC-BC US Edition

FC-BC UK Edition

UK Gold Foil Template

40k stuff

2011-06-16T23:31:00.000+01:00

Kev at work offered to take some photos of my Warhammer 40k models which he saw me painting on my lunch break. Here's the results:

HOPE!

2011-05-27T22:39:00.000+01:00

An image of The Mighty One that myself and Mike Molcher came up with the idea for one afternoon at work. It's based on this famous campaign poster for Barack Obama that loads of people have satirized already (You can check some of them out here, my personal favourite is the DOOM one) but it's a really cool bit of art itself.

This is Molcher holding up the enormous (and zarjaz) 4x6' banner we had made for the Bristol Comic Con - hopefully we'll get to do some more stuff with it as well...

*cough* t-shirts!

No Man's World: The Ironclad Prophecy

2011-04-28T16:45:00.001+01:00

Finally sent this to press this afternoon, after starting the cover art for the Abaddon 2011 catalogue several months ago. Earlier this week I updated the landscape along the bottom based on a cool scene in the book suggested by Pat Kelleher. I also added some gassy nebula stuff up the one side, blood on the goggles and various other little bits and bobs.

I'm glad I finally got to the deadline on this - I'd have kept endlessly changing it otherwise!

Cover art without text is below, plus the design for the front and back cover of the book and some sketches I drew when designing the Stone Beetle and Jabberwock.

The back cover image is the spacey stuff from the cover, rearranged with all the other elements removed. The Jabberwork ended up being quite small on the cover, and I changed it's body shape anyway, but I still think this sketch of it's head is pretty cool.

More Vince

2011-04-24T21:07:00.001+01:00

Been ages since I did something just for fun, so I've been doing this in my spare time over the weekend. It's also the first time in ages I haven't finished a a picture in photoshop and used ACTUAL PENS, which was cool (although I couldn't help but add some dot screen stuff after I scanned it in...). Might colour it at a later date. I quite like it as is though.

The pencils, plus some doodles I did in front of the TV before I started. Trying to work out what my character looks like. I never bothered before, just winged it from panel to panel. I was kind of thinking of a grizzled Ayrton Senna, with a laconic French thing going on, but in the sketch above he looks more like Pat Mills... sorted it out in the inks.

The Pig

2011-04-21T18:38:00.000+01:00

E.P. artwork for my mate's band Leather Pig.

Cover

Back cover and spines

Back of the interior booklet

Some stuff I did for them previously, which was fun. We all wanted to something a bit more mature this time round though... I still like the black and white pig head with the cleaver in it.

Pax Britannia, Fat Dinosaurs and Mechanical Men

2011-04-01T13:45:00.001+01:00

I'm doing quite a bit of work on the Pax Britannia series at the moment - first up is a cover for a ebook collection of Ulysses Quicksilver short stories, out soon from Abaddon. It's based on a quick sketch I did ages ago so it was cool to go back and use it for something. The picture without coverlines is below, and the original sketch is here.

I also created a desktop wallpaper from the Anno Frankenstein image i drew a month or so ago, but I've had to sit on it a bit waiting for the release date (along with a postcard, poster and various other things. If you're interested there's a one for sale on the charity Genre for Japan auction site, signed by Jon Green - and me apparently, but I havent seen it yet!). Various sizes are now available for download on the Abaddon Books site. As a bit of a weird coincidence check out the cover for this weeks 2000 AD!

I'm also currently producing a cover for the next Pax B book by Al Ewing. Look out for Pax Omega, coming soon!

Old MG Painting

2011-03-04T18:01:00.000Z

Painting of a nice old MG I saw at Shelsley Walsh hill climb, which I went to with my dad. No idea what year/model it is, who owns it or anything, just liked the car! 26x18" in Oils.

Vitruvian SteamFrank

2011-02-24T17:21:00.000Z

An internal illustration for the upcoming Pax Britannia novel Anno Frankenstein by Jon Green. Looks kind of like the Borg would if they were steam powered! I might make it into a free desktop wallpaper on the Abaddon site at some point which would be cool...

Flesh eating dinosaurs! Cute dogs! More book covers!

2011-01-20T11:10:00.000Z

After a bit of badgering, Tharg let me do this image for the Flesh preview ad in 2000 AD prog 2011. Initially I asked if I could do a pin-up or something but as there was already (an awesome) one by Ben Willsher in that issue so he suggested coming up with something for the new series of Flesh. I was going to do something digital but I decided on oil paint when I'd come up with a rough sketch. Below are the final ad as it appeared in the Prog and a WIP photo taken about an hour after starting.

Below is a painting I did as a suprise Christmas present for some friends. This is Mutley, their dog. The hardest thing about it was getting the deaf old bugger to sit still long enough to take a decent reference photo... I managed one in the end but you can see my hand in the corner propping him up. he kept lying down or sniffing the camera when i stopped fussing him long enough to take a picture. Also, lying in the photo is an old turquoise canvas which is what made me choose the background colour of the final painting, I was just gonna go for browny black to start with. It took me about 4.5 hours to finish, in 2 sessions which is quite quick for me. The WIP pic was taken at the end of my first, so about 2 and a half hours in. I'll take a better picture of the final art soon, this is just off my phone so it's a bit fuzzy.

Before Christmas I did a mockup for a new book in Abaddon's Tomes of the Dead line called Double Dead and written by an American author; Chuck Wendig. What started off as a sketch actually looks pretty cool so hopefully I'll get to finish it off for the proper book. It's about a vampire (who is a bit of a dick I think, which should be entertaining) who has to protect a bunch of humans in a zombie apocalypse just so he's got something to eat! You can read more about the story here.

I want to add some grey zombie silouettes along the bottom of the pic, maybe chasing someone, but I'll do that later - this was just for the Abaddon 2011 catalogue.

Lastly is the final cover for The Black Chalice by Steven Saville, which I had to had to redo again using a more interesting pose from the photos I took several months ago. The original version is in one of my older posts if you want to compare them. I must have reworked this image at least 4 times now so I really don't know what to think any more! Anyway below is the final image and the final book cover. I did 2 skies too, one red, one blue. I like the red one a lot in the picture on its own but when I dropped it into a cover template, zoomed in a bit and put some text over the top it looked a bit unicorn-t-shirt-cheesy so I changed back to a sky that looked more like my first attempt at the cover.

Design Led Covers

2010-12-03T17:32:00.000Z

Some more cover art I've been working on for Solaris, this time a bit more graphic than illustrative. The Regicide is the only one I actually did any real drawing for, but I mucked about with it in Photoshop so much you can hardly tell any more! This cover will probably get tweaked a bit before print as I had to do it quickly for a catalogue, and I'm hoping they'll shell out for a metallic spot colour on the text and maze but we'll see about that...

The other covers are for some books Solaris have the e-publishing rights for by James Lovegrove. They needed doing pretty quickly which is why we chose the style they're in, but its nice to do the whole lot at once and see them all tie together. The top 3 are mine and the bottom 2 where done by Luke the other Solaris designer. All 5 took us about an hour and a half but I think they've turned out well.

The Thanksgiving Turkey

2010-11-19T18:03:00.001Z

The Thanksgiving Turkey! I've literally no idea either... for a web banner advertising some giveaway stuff on the Facebook Evil Genius game I think, but I was just happy to draw a crazed looking bird with a bomb!

Recent Cover Work

2010-11-04T15:13:00.000Z

I don't seem to have finished anything for ages, but last week the Solaris and Abaddon 2011 catalogue went to press which gave me the kick up the arse I needed to finish a load of covers I've had half finished weeks. Most of these still aren't done 100% finished but they're all getting there.

No Man's World: The Ironclad Prophecy

This is the second book in the No Man's World series by Pat Kelleher. I hadn't even started this til a few days ago so I had to steal a few bits old art to make it look complete. The red landscape at the bottom of the image is the same as book 1 which I'll have to update later but everything else is pretty much there. Despite the hastiness I'm really pleased with it at the moment!

Malory's Knights of Albion

These are covers for the first 2 books in the series. Like the Ironclad cover above I only had a day or two to put The Savage Knight together last week, and I'm very happy with it. This is the only cover here that's totally finished. Book 1, The Black Chalice was a bit more painful. It looks ok now, but I've been mucking around with it for weeks, and I think it's going to end up getting dropped and changed now anyway, mainly due to the strength of the book 2 art. This is fine by me as I spent so long shopping and changing the art I've no idea what to think of it anymore. Book 2 is miles better, so Book 1 needs to be just as good. I 've already started the replacement and its working much better already.

Solaris Rising

Last up is the cover for a new SF anthology from Solaris. Above is the rough mockup for the cover (I might change the text layout) and below that the whole image. I want to scene to wrap around the front onto the spine and back page in the end. This is another cover thats occasionally been a bit difficult. I've really enjoyed doing all the fancy glowing planets and space gas but what's held this cover up is a shuttle I wanted to the foreground. I must have designed and rejected 30 ships and still haven't done one I'm happy with. Now that the backgrounds pretty much done though I'm starting to think it might not even need it, or at least not as big as I first imagined.

Introducing: The Fly!

2010-10-02T20:07:00.000+01:00

The first intro page for a new character in Blood and Plunder - La Mosca; a Mexican wrestler, dwarf, and professional Death Car Championship driver with several pneumatic limbs (none of which you can see in action on this page).

Get Well Carlos!

2010-09-30T15:39:00.000+01:00

A best wishes card for Carlos Ezquerra following the operation he had on his lung a few months ago, courtesy of all the droids at 2000 AD. I think there was a whole booklet put together and sent to him for this project, but I don't really know anything else about it I'm afraid... The mighty One commanded it drawn and that was that!

Century of the Soldier

2010-08-06T13:20:00.000+01:00

A preview of the cover for the second volume in the Monarchies of God series; Century of the Soldier. As before the 3D work for the Helmet was done by Andrew Evans, and I think it's turned out even better than the first one. The colours work really well and the gun especially looks superb! Underneath is an advert myself and Andrew put together for the Monarchies series as a whole. One of the main benefits of taking the time to make all these objects actually 'exist' is the we can do stuff like this with them without having to re-draw anything. I think it looks cool and is first appearing in Judge Dredd Megazine 301.

In keeping with the first book, we've updated the symbol for the chapter breaks too, this time with the symbol for the Merduk religion and its prophet Ahrimuz, which has a much more Turkish influence. Here it is:

The Monarchies of God: Century of the Soldier is released in September 2010 from Solaris Books

Ulysses Quicksilver update

2010-08-04T14:30:00.000+01:00

After leaving this for the weekend and then coming back to it, I decided it wasn't working properly. I've redone the statue and added some extra lighting and rain. This is what happens when you have a long deadline and slightly too many ideas... much more pleased now though.

The Ulysses Quicksilver Omnibus vol 1

2010-07-30T17:30:00.000+01:00

Above are my favourite cover mockups (from about 6) for The Ulysses Quicksilver Omnibus, collecting together the first 3 books in the Pax Britannia series by Jon Green. As you can see from the 'final' cover and spine below I ended up combining the 2, as they both seemed too good to waste! I think Jon Green initially suggested having Britannia on the cover, which I liked the idea of.

Below are some of my rejected roughs. You can see the evolution of the ideas to the final version. I tend to tie myself in knots doing slightly too many similar ideas, but these are the main different ones. In fact I'd totally forgotten about number 2... I really like it! Why didnt I do that one? Arg!

2000 AD Redesign

2010-07-30T17:02:00.000+01:00

I've been tweaking the 2000 AD logo over the past few weeks, and have redesigned the Nerve Centre and Input page. All starting in Prog 1700 in a few weeks!

Here's the logo, with various colour tests. It's not changed too much, but I've fattened the letters and redone the badge. I always liked the badge from the early-90's so I've tried to echo that but keep it looking modern. My other objective was to get rid of the price/barcode boxes that normally sit to the right of the logo at the top of the cover. Without these it can sit completely centrally and uses the full width of the page. The issue number will now go under the badge, and the other details will all be in the barcode box, which will float around from week to week depending on where it fits best.

This is a teaser advert I designed for Prog 1699 and Megazine 301. The ace new Tharg is by Henry Flint. Lastly here's a rough template for the editorial pages: I was getting annoyed with the old ones being too fussy so I've stripped them right back. They've also been bought more in line with the current look of the Megazine which Luke Preece did a few months ago.

Prog 1700 is on sale 1st September 2010 - go and buy it!

Eat Lead!

2010-07-13T23:57:00.000+01:00

The 'Mnargh?' panel makes me giggle every time I think about it.

Scotch Corner

2010-07-05T23:05:00.001+01:00

I was very happy to get an email last week from Graeme Neil Reid at Scotch Corner, a collection of Scotish artists who run a blog together, asking if I'd like to contribute something to a guest post section they do every Sunday. This is the picture I submitted, a kind of cover image for Blood & Plunder. I was made up about this so thanks to them for asking me to contribute. There's some ace stuff on their site, check it out!

Zombo!

2010-07-05T13:51:00.000+01:00

Zombo's creators Al Ewing & Henry Flint, zombied up for an After(life)word in the forthcoming 2000 AD graphic novel!

Blood and Plunder

2010-06-18T15:32:00.000+01:00

finished page 3 last night - pretty chuffed with it.

more stuff here. Want to get another 3 pages done for Comic Con... and I work S L O W L Y...

The Monarchies of God

2010-06-04T12:17:00.000+01:00

Hawkwood and the Kings

Above is the final cover art for the first volume of Paul Kearney's Monarchies of God series, published by Solaris. This collects the first 2 books in a 5 book series - Hawkwood's Voyage and The Heretic Kings. This is something that's been great to work on, as the books are really good and unlike the other covers I've done I actually got to read them before starting! The whole series has been published several times previously, and from the start Paul said he'd like the covers to be totally different from the other releases, which had a very classic fully painted fantasy look to them. Not that there's anything wrong with that of course, but he felt these should feel different. My initial roughs are shown below, based on items, weapons and equipment the characters in the book use (Corfe's/The Cathedraller's helmet, a cavalry sabre and a Ramusian religious looking mace. This was meant more to show a general idea of what I was after, rather than something to finish properly at a later date.

I think Paul thought these were OK but immediately pointed out that the helmet was far too medieval looking, and should be based on helmets from a much later period in British history. Not being an expert on this kind of thing I was pointed in the direction of a Civil War re-enactor who works in our office, Andrew Evans. Initially I was just hoping for some guidance and reference material, but Andrew also happens to be an excellent 3D artist and offered to not only help design, but also render the helmet, sabre and golden mace. He's done a superb job, and the final elements are shown below. They're far more realistic and detailed than I could have hoped to do on my own, and now that these items 'exist' I'm hoping we can use them from different angles and in proper scenes when it comes to designing advertising and promotional material for the series.

The next job was to incorporate his art into my cover design. I added them onto the background and lit the objects so they reflected the red from the behind. The whole thing looked good, but was far shorter than my initial rough so I added the twin golden rings around the elements. This helps with focus and the art now filled the space better without me having to totally redesign the text. The fur in the ring is a reference to the werewolves which play a large part of the story, and was made by scanning in a vile luminous pink acrylic cushion that my dog lies on...

I didn't look at the cover art again for a few weeks as it was done well in advance of the deadline, but when I did (2 days before print) I found the layered photoshop file I'd made first time round had been lost/deleted from my computer! Bit of a minor disaster, and I had to re-do the bloody thing from scratch! This turned out to be a blessing in disguise as my second go at it looked much better than the first. The rings have more colour reflected in them, the fur is more defined, and I added a nice old leathery texture to the red background which followed round onto the spine and back page. The final front and back covers are below.

The next job was to come up with a design for the interior pages, which is normally quite easy once the cover is done, as you can use the fonts and style of the cover when finished. Myself and David Moore came up with a symbol to represent the Ramusian religion from the book for use on chapter breaks and the like. I think this religion is based loosely on Catholic church so we tried to echo that without expressly using a crucifix, and with a twin border to match the cover rings.

Lastly I had to redraw the staple of any fantasy series: the maps. I actually quite like the original map drawings, with their hand written text and stuff, but as we'd spent a lot of effort with the rest of the book it seemed cheap not to update these too. Plus the only versions we had of them would have been page scanned from earlier releases and would have been a bit blurry and crap. I redrew the coastlines and features as closely as possible then relettered the areas and cities using the same fonts as the cover and internal pages, then added a good inch or so onto the top and bottom of each one so they fitted the new page dimensions better. As with the symbol above I added a twin lined border to echo the cover. Original maps are on the left, updated ones are on the right. The only thing left to do now is the entirety of volume 2!

The Monarchies of God Volume 1: Hawkwood and the Kings is released August 2010 from Solaris Books.

Coming soon to 2000 AD!

2010-05-16T12:55:00.000+01:00

Enough said really.

Camper van - painting in progress

2010-05-16T12:40:00.001+01:00

This is a VW camper van I'm painting for a mate at work. It's not finished yet, but I took a photo each time I stopped working on it. Here's the progress so far:

stage 1 - roughed out the layout in blue, then added some basic colours

stage 2 - waited for the first bit to dry then I went in and sorted out the sky, and upped the lighting on the van.

stage 3 - painted the detail onto the van, and added even more glow round the sun. The van is pretty much done now, but i want to add more detail into the grass and onto the island on the right. might make the sun even brighter too. The next stage will probably finish the picture!

Dirk Danger - Intergalactic Space Ace!

2010-05-05T00:43:00.001+01:00

Just finished the first page of the latest episode of Dirk Danger. Have a look at it here!

Page 2 coming later this week if I can get time to finish it...

The Infernal Game: Ghost Dance

2010-04-19T22:33:00.001+01:00

This is the latest cover I've done for the Abaddon Books: Infernal Game series, and is the sequel to Cold Warriors. Not sure about the layout of the cover text yet, but I'm happy with the image. There's an unused alternative I was trying out below too - I wanted to make the 2 book covers match, and keep the main image inside the pentagram but I didn't think it worked very well. The 2 parts, are quite similar in shape and interfered with each other too much so I put the raven behind.

No Man's World update

2010-01-28T19:03:00.000Z

I recently had to modify this cover art to make the gas mask look more realistic, which initially irritated me as the cover was finished several months before the deadline... but now I'm really glad I did it, as it looks much better! This book 'Black Hand Gang' will be released as part of a big sales push/relaunch by Abaddon Books over the summer so should end up in some promotions and stuff in bookshops, both here and in the US which is great!

Completely coincidentally the other Abaddon cover I did (Cold Warriors) is going in the same promotion - I hope they both do really well!

Triumph Spitfire

2010-01-28T17:50:00.000Z

Triumph Spitfire. 25'x18'. Oils

A scan of my most recently finished painting, a commission for a birthday present.

Che Album artwork

2010-01-19T22:45:00.000Z

Album artwork for the band Ché. The final cover will be cropped in a lot closer on the face.

Cold Warriors cover art

2009-12-10T14:06:00.000Z

This is the latest cover i've done for Abaddon Books. The series is called The Infernal Game. Not sure of the the plot to be honest but as far as I can assertain it involves 60s cold war spies and the occult, so plenty of stuff to work with!
I must have done about 50 different variations of this bloody thing before scraping them all and starting on the final image above. Some of the ditched ideas are below:

A very abaddon xmas

2009-12-10T13:54:00.000Z

logo for the new... the new... erm, well its logo for something that abaddon books are doing. No idea if it exists, or where at the moment, but i did a nice picture for it anyway...

New lunchbreak of the dead strip

2009-12-10T13:44:00.000Z

Just finished another Lunchbreak of the Dead strip, with a beautiful festive theme. Online here now, and printed in 2000 AD prog 2010 out on 17th december!

2000 AD covers uncovered

2009-11-06T10:39:00.000Z

Just finished this pic for Pete Wells, who runs the 2000 AD covers uncovered blog at http://2000adcovers.blogspot.com/

It's a cool site dedicated to showing 2000 AD cover art in all its glory, i.e. before the designer gets his filthy hands on them and plasters logos, text and other junk all over the place.

The hideously obscured Dredd image on the front cover of the prog is by Dylan Teague, so thank you to him. I didn't actually ask him if I could use it, so apologies for that. I hope he doesn't mind...

Car paintings

2009-11-02T21:44:00.000Z

1920-something Crossley Tourer. 18x24' oil on canvas

I've got a bit of a thing for cars. This is the first one I tried painting properly. It was a present for my dad - it's his car in the painting.

2001 Rover Mini Seven. 18x24' oil on canvas

Another present - this time for my wife. She had this car from new and was a bit gutted when she had to sell it recently, so I did her a picture to remember it by.

mk.1 Triumph Spitfire. work-in-progress.

A commission! Only spent a couple of hours on this so far, hence the roughness but it's starting to look the right shape now. I quite like some of the rougher, half-finished areas so I might leave some bits further back in the painting very loose (the far front light for example) and bring the foreground into focus. The chrome bumpers looking ok too, although I need to adjust the centre line of the bonnet.

Black Hand Gang cover art

2009-10-30T13:54:00.000Z

I'm currently putting the finishing touches to a book cover for a new series called No Man's World from Abaddon Books, written by Pat Kelleher. The first book is called Black Hand Gang and is out in February 2010 I think. Set initially in the First World War, the story's about a group of tommies from the Pennine Fusiliers who get poked through time and space and end up on a hideous outer galactic death planet full of monsters and madness - sounds wicked! Anyway, Pat has been really helpful with tons of reference, advice and opinions about the cover so thanks to him for that - I'm looking forward to reading it!

The pictures below show my original concept, which was a bit too futuristic (didn't know at the time they where from 1914) and under that are my pencils and colours for the final art. Last is a pic of what cover will look like on the shelf.

I've also been working on a regimental badge for the Fusiliers which I'll put up soon.

First post!

2009-10-30T12:48:00.000Z

just a test really, and a picture for good measure! A 18x22" oil painting I did of some apples.

Embarrasingly as I didn't have anything to paint at the weekly class I go to, and had to bail into Tesco express and desperately hunt for something interesting to use...