Hellboy to the power of Hellboy

I was excited to recently read of the discovery of a new dinosaur, Regaliceratops peterhewsi, which has the enjoyable distinction of being a bit like a Triceratops but a bit different, and thus very likely qualifies as the coolest thing to happen in 2015 so far. Also enjoyable is the fact that it's discoverers nicknamed the fossil 'Hellboy' - not in fact for anything to do with the horns, but because of some peculiar difficulties in the excavation. 

Anyway, once I became acquainted with these two pieces of information, a course of action pretty much immediately presented itself.

Boba Fett Riding a Triceratops

I blogged yesterday about some of the new things available in my online shop, including the fact I am now taking commissions to draw PEOPLE RIDING DINOSAURS. Any person, any dinosaur. In describing this idea on twitter, I used the random example "Boba Fett Riding a Triceratops".

...and then I had to draw that.

BUY YOURS NOW!

Neill's Dinosaur Shop is OPEN!

I've just updated my online shop in time for Christmas, offering Christmas Cards and Comics and some EXCITING NEW THINGS like original artwork from Pirates of Pangaea, and... commissions!

Yes, for the first time in ages I'm opening up a few slots for commissions: A3 original artwork of ANY PERSON RIDING ANY DINOSAUR. Please note that for the purposes of this, 'Person' may of course include aliens, ninjas, robots, sentient octopi, adorable toddlers...

An example! Would you like a drawing of YOUR children riding a dinosaur? 

Or your granny, for that matter. Or I dunno, Benedict Cumberbatch, I don't care.

...WHATEVER YOU WANT. And riding the dinosaur of your choice, too! COME ON THAT IS PRETTY GREAT.

Get your orders in NOW in time for Christmas! North American people, you'll need to order by Monday; UK People you've got all of next week. Australians, I fear it is too late for you already and for this I apologise. I only just had the idea, you see?

Happy Dinosaury Christmas!

The Phoenix Century

Guess what just made it to 100 issues?

That's right! The Phoenix, the weekly story comic for children that for some reason continues to let me write and draw things, is 100 issues young this week. Fire the party poppers! Ring the bells! Cut the cake! Actually that's a good point, we should have cake.

As others who are better on facts and figures than I have noted, this is quite the notable achievement, as it's the first UK independent kids' comic to reach 100 issues in the last 40 YEARS. Which I think we can all agree, is NIFTY.

I am just hugely proud and still kind of surprised and delighted that I get to be a part of such a fun amazing thing with such extravagantly talented, brilliant people.

Anyway, I thought I ought to mark the occasion somehow, so here as a SPECIAL TREAT is some behind-the-scenes art from the very early days, when we were developing Pirates of Pangaea in the first place, and hadn't quite figured out what colour Cornflower should be...

...or, I guess, that she was called Cornflower.

Anyway, huge thanks to Will and Tom and Liz and Caro and Paul and Charlie and everyone who actually manages to make this extraordinary thing happen on a weekly basis, to Dan for coming up with the rather fine wheeze of sticking pirates on dinosaurs, and to David and Ben for letting me join in with it all in the first place. And most of all, the hugest of all thanks to everyone who's bought and read and supported and TOLD THEIR FRIENDS about the comic. Please keep doing so, we're off to a fantastic start but there's a whole world out there still to conquer.

If you've dilly-dallied about checking out the Phoenix, why not give it a try? You can buy the bumper-sized Issue 100 here, or in your nearest stockist, or find some excellent Christmas gift ideas HERE!

Here's to 100 more! No wait, 100,000 more! LET'S AIM HIGH.

How To Paint (Awesome) Big Dinosaurs In (Awesome) Shop Windows

I spent this last Friday at Waterstones in High Wycombe painting big dinosaurs in shop windows; to help celebrate the launch of the Phoenix in that branch and also, just because it was an excuse to paint big dinosaurs in shop windows is and that is kind of my thing now? Anyway, in case you ever fancy having a go at painting big dinosaurs in shop windows, here is a STEP-BY-STEP guide to get you started!

 

STAGE ONE: linework! Drawn on the window's exterior using Posca pens. I really like this stage, you can just kind of see the vague ghost of what the picture might become. Which is, in this case, a dinosaur fighting a pirate. Because OF COURSE IT IS.

STAGE TWO: Painting the linework on the inside of the window. You can possibly see the pirate's face has gone a bit messy, which is because I decided halfway through to perform an abrupt piratical genderswap and turn him into a her. I dunno, it felt like the whole thing was leaning a bit boy-y?

Of course, Cornflower (the T-Rex) is in fact a girl T-Rex. But I guess there is a slight chance the casual shopping passersby of High Wycombe may not be aware of that. 

STAGE THREE: linework completed, wait for it to dry, possibly wander off and find a sandwich, and then start to apply colours!

You can get a better look at our now-female pirate here. By losing the beard you lose a little bit of piratical iconicity but, y'know, at some point we as a culture need to start working harder to create new and more inclusive icons. And also she still has the hat and an eyepatch so WHATEVER.

STAGE FOUR: starting to fill in the large areas of flat colour. If you have someone on hand to assist with this: DO SO, as it is quite boring. In these pictures you can see Ross Fraser of the Phoenix, ably fulfilling this role. Make sure to stand behind them and regularly tell them that they've 'missed a spot', preferably just after they think they've finished and have cleaned their brushes. They are guaranteed to find this both helpful and hilarious!

STAGE FIVE: you're done!

 

Now go and sit down, have a cup of tea, and wait for comics to reemerge as a populist and commercially successful artform.

This may take up to an hour.

Anyway, huge thanks to Faye and all the team at High Wycombe for being so awesome and welcoming and comics-positive! And for letting us paint big dinosaurs in their shop windows.

If YOU have any shop windows that you would like big dinosaurs painted in: please do not hesitate to get in touch. ALSO AVAILABLE: BIG ROBOTS.

How To Build a Ghost Pirate Dinosaur Ship

 

This week's issue of The Phoenix features the rip-roaring conclusion (and that's not just hyperbole: THINGS GET RIPPED AND THERE IS A LOT OF ROARING) of our recent Pirates of Pangaea mini-epic, Ghosts of Mathrak Chu! And so it seemed a good time to (a) remind you of this fact, so you can all run out and buy a copy, and (b) share a little peek at some of the art and how it was put together.

This story, of course, featured GHOSTS PIRATES riding on GHOST DINOSAURS, because I guess Dan had not quite sufficiently found ways to blow my mind with things that were awesome / painfully difficult to draw. Anyway, it took a bit of figuring out but I was really happy with how it turned out. "Spooky Dio De Los Muertos Dinos" was the general effect I was going for, and it involved adding a couple of extra stages in the inking and colouring. First I'd draw the regular dinosaur:

...and then do the skeleton as a separate layer. I've added a grey underlayer to these pics so that the skeleton was visible and, basically, so my writer and editor could get some idea what I was going for...

And then it was just adding the colours and a bit of glowy misty effects. Almost like making Mo-Bot Dinosaurs, really (and there's a whole other story waiting to happen...).

Here's a couple more pages!

Aaaand one more, this time with Sophie and Cornflower JUST PLAIN BEING AWESOME:

There were some pages in this thing that weren't splash pages, I swear.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who's said lovely things about our little return to Pangeaea, it's wonderful to hear people are enjoying it. I'm currently hard at work on our NEXT instalment, which is going to be another giant whopping epic adventure, full of - guess what - insanely awesome and exciting new ideas from Dan that are horribly hard to draw. COMING SOON TO THE PHOENIX! 

ALRIGHT, SOON...ISH!

Spooky Pirate Ghost Dinosaurs!

This is just a quick art post to alert anyone who may have missed it to the fact that Pirates of Pangaea RETURNS this very week, in issue 33 of The Phoenix! Available from Waitroses, indy book and comic shops everywhere (find your nearest stockist HERE) and via subscription.

It's the start of a mini-epic spookalicious new adventure for Sophie and Kelsey, and to further entice you to pick it up I thought I'd share a couple of pages of the unlettered artwork from the first episode here. Enjoy!

 

 

Huge thanks to everyone who's said nice things about the new strip already, either on twitter or at Caption this weekend. Dan and I are delighted to be back in the comic, and really hope people enjoy this new adventure... 

Mega Mecha Monkey Masterclass, PLUS Recent Rovings Round-Up!

This week's Phoenix Comic is out today, and it features the first of Art Monkey's brand-new MEGA MONKEY MASTERCLASSES - comic strips where the sketching simian has started a comic but left it up to YOU the reader to finish off the salient details! Check it out in this week's Phoenix - available from these fine vendors - and you can download a big version of the strip as an activity sheet, FOR FREE, from Art Monkey's page on the Phoenix website.

Along with, indeed, ALL the previous Art Monkey activity sheets! We're up to 17 now and believe me, there's loooooaaaaads more to come. Look, here are a few:

 

Get sketching and you, YES YOU could be the proud recipient of Art Monkey's Top Banana Award! Which looks a little something like THIS:

Hey, while I'm here: I've done a couple of workshops in recent weeks and completely failed to blog about them, so I'd just like to say a big thank you to Buff Baughan and Tam Weaver at Storyfest in Hartfield, where I recently spent a glorious sunny day in a beautiful village teaching a bunch of awesome kids how to make comics. And got JAM. And also to Judith Merryat Team V and Rachel Smith of Oxford's Natural History Museum for inviting me along and making me so welcome doing some recent workshops at the museum. (Said museum is genuinely one of my favourite places on Earth, so it really was a thrill to get to hang out there and teach kids about drawing and making up characters amongst many of the very artefacts that inspired my work on Pirates of Pangaea.)

Look, here I am with one of the groups. YEAH. UNDERNEATH A T-REX.

 And here is some of the absolute nonsense we were making up...

For a half-dinosaur half-Mr Bean likeness drawn from memory of what Rowan Atkinson looks like, I have to say: I am pretty happy with that.

And a final thank you to Ross Fraser at the Phoenix who was a huge help at these events; organising, taking these photos, and folding post-it-notes really quite beautifully.

Lots more school and library workshops coming up over the summer which I will, no doubt, competely fail to blog about here. If you're a teacher / librarian / bookshop owner and would like me to come teach how to draw Dinosaur Rowan Atkinsons and suchlike, you can find some more information about my workshops on my website. Thanks!

Pirates of Pangaea: First Teaser Poster!

(Pirates of Pangaea, all images and concepts ©2011 Daniel Hartwell & Neill Cameron)

I am delighted to be able to share with you this first bit of previewy teasery postery art from Dan Hartwell and I's upcoming swashbuckling dinosaurical magnum opus, The Pirates of Pangaea. Coming in The Phoenix Comic, a brand new story comic for children launching in January 2012!

I'm having so much fun drawing this thing already, and I absolutely can't wait to set it loose upon the world. (I know that January seems like a long time to wait, but believe me from the point of view of me having to draw it all, it is NO TIME AT ALL.)

Make sure you sign up to the Phoenix newsletter to get the early scoop on all the exciting stuff that's coming up soon - and believe me, there is some genuinely tingle-inducingly exciting stuff in the works...

Will blog lots more about this as we get nearer the time. And there'll be another teaser image coming soon which I'm really excited about - something I was in fact so pleased with that I think it joins page 62 of MoBot High in the rather exclusive 'Things I Have Drawn That I'm Actually Reasonably Happy With' club.

Pirates! And Dinosaurs! Come on.

Meet Doc Dinosaur

A weird thing about the recently-completed A-Z of Awesomeness was that at no point did it involve dinosaurs, which is almost unthinkable given that (a) I am mildly obsessed with them, and (b) lets face it, they have an Awesomeness Quotient second only to Giant Robots and possibly Jack Kirby. Here to make up for it is the first of probably several dino-themed posts for this week! Meet... Doc Dinosaur!

This was a stray idea my fellow ex-DFC creator Mr Tony Lee was kicking around a while back. He is a dinosaur in a jetpack - there may have been rather more to the pitch than that, but that was all it took to sell me on it.

Here are some of my (somewhat TOO SCARY) initial sketches:

Will the adventures of Doc Dinosaur be coming soon to a comics shop / cinema / saturday morning cartoon near you? Oh, probably.

More awesomeness tomorrow!

Sketchbook Scan #0013: Nazi Velociraptor

Pretty self-explanatory, really.

See more Dinosaurs over at Super Comics Adventure Squad!

Rrraaaaarrggghh!!!!

Here's a little snippet of a thing I'm drawing at the moment - inks and backgrounds removed, this is just the colour layer.
I just thought it looked cool like that!