Meet The Pirates: Bosun William

Here is the second in a regular series where I'll be offering a peek into my sketchbook at my designs for the stars of The Pirates of Pangaea (appearing weekly in The Phoenix, go subscribe kids! It is I-ain't-even-foolin' GREAT). This week we are saying a big Pangaean hello to Bosun William, or Master Bosun, or simply The Bosun to his friends. Rugged, stoical and heroic, he is Sophie's only protector amidst the dinosaur and pirate-infested scarinessfest that is Pangaea. So rugged, stoical and heroic in fact that he can wear a ponytail with a bow on it and still appear rugged, stoical and heroic.

More pirates next week!

Several Drawings of Spider-Man and the Hulk

I have been practising drawing Spider-Man and the Hulk! Mostly in an attempt to impress my son.

Was at Caption 2010 this weekend, and had a thoroughly super time. Will blog properly about it soon!

SUMO RIDDLE BOMB!!!

Occasionally I like to draw something random, to cheer myself up / warm up / get the juices flowing / blah blah bah. Anyway, today was such a day, so I put out the call for Twitter to tell me what to draw. Leenygma suggested:

A cross between a Sumo Wrestler and a heroic version of the Riddler. With a jetpack.

Combining as it does two of my very favourite things to draw (obscenely fat guys, jetpacks), this was clearly a no-brainer for me. His name is SUMO RIDDLE BOMB!!! and I think you will agree he deserves his own Saturday morning cartoon series immediately.

More nonsense like this - next week? Oh, probably.

A Judge, Who is Not Dredd

No time for Hashtag Funnies today, so thought I'd just post a random sketchbook scan instead.

It's clearly NOT Dredd, I just drew his name badge kind of automatically.

The Pirates of East Oxford Community Centre

I had a very pleasant time this weekend at Caption 2009 - met lots of lovely people, talked about comics and doodled me some pirates and dinosaurs. The first talk I went to was Karen Rubins talking about her current residency at the V&A - which sounds great, and I hope to pop along for a visit on one of her upcoming open days.

I had a vague idea that I would sketch people at Caption during the talks, but decided against it in Kaz's talk as I thought it might be offputting and am never sure about the etiquette of drawing people without asking. So I drew a pirate and a dinosaur instead. (I quite like drawing pirates and dinosaurs, as regular readers of this blog may have realised).

Anyway, afterwards Kaz proceeded to draw me without asking - an uncanny likeness, she really captured my Mr. Potato-Head-With-Glasses quality - so apparently that's okay. She also said that if I'd drawn her as a pirate that would have been fine. Which gave me an idea for the rest of the talks.
Here is comics creator Garen Ewing, as a pirate, with a dinosaur. Garen was talking about his book the Rainbow Orchid, which I have been telling anyone who'll listen about since, ooh, 2003, and Vol. 1 of which has recently been published to great acclaim by Egmont. It was fantastic to see some of Garen's sketches, character designs and pencils / inks during the talk - although the real highlight was getting a sneak peek of the cover to Vol. 2, which was just absolutely jaw-droppingly beautiful.

The next thing I went to was Sarah McIntyre's talk about picture books, comics and the cross-fertilisation therebetween, and it was utterly fascinating - I spent the whole thing gawping at incredible work by artists I'd never heard of and trying to write down all their names, which kept me so busy I never even managed to finish my picture of Sarah as a pirate.

Next up was Asia Alfasi talking about her work and her upcoming autobiographical book, which I can't wait to check out. Her story back in vol. 1 of Best New Manga was great, and a short story she had in Manga Jiman that dealt with her upbringing and moving from Libya to Glasgow was really interesting, so I can't wait to see a full-length book. Anyway, it was another really fascinating talk (hosted / interviewed by Caption organiser Jenni Scott) - but I somehow managed to find the time to draw Asia as a dinosaur pirate, anyway.


As I say, a great weekend, and huge thanks to Jenni, Jay, Selina and the rest of the team for organising it. I think this was possibly my favourite Caption I've attended so far, maybe just because I didn't have anything to do this year but listen to the talks, catch up with friends and meet nice people.

Or, maybe, because there was cake.

Girl, With Hammer

Found this in while flipping through a recent sketchbook and thought I would ink and colour it up for FUN!

Here's the original: It kind of turned into a promo piece / ad for Thumpculture, my awesome martial arts webcomic which I last updated in, um, February 2008. Hang in there, it'll be back one day.

He Looks Like I Feel

Just playing with a few test images, taking the same sketch and messing around with a texture in different layer modes.

The guy is a chap who was sent to Siberia by Stalin, whose photograph was in the Guardian's Weekend section a couple of weeks ago, along with several of his fellow unfortunates. I'm afraid I have since misplaced the article, so have no idea of his name or history. I just thought he had an arresting face.

Sketchbook Scan #0013: Nazi Velociraptor

Pretty self-explanatory, really.

See more Dinosaurs over at Super Comics Adventure Squad!

Sketchbook Scan #0012: Pride and Prejudice

#0012: Miss Elizabeth Bennett and Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy

I saw the other day that Marvel are publishing a comic-book adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, which boggles my mind for many reasons, not least of which is the sheer cosmic injustice that I don't get to draw it.

Hey Marvel! If you're ever doing Persuasion, GIVE ME A CALL.

Meet... KID NINJA! Can you guess what his deal is?

Back when I first went into the DFC offices to pitch I took in four ideas, from which my lovely editor chaps Ben and Will had what I can in retrospect see was the very good sense to pick the one that would, once properly kicked into shape, become Mo-Bot High. I thought it would be fun to post some stuff here from one of the ones they didn't pick....

Kid Ninja!

He is a kid, who is a ninja!

Can you believe they didn't go for a high concept like that?

Here is the 'movie poster':

And here are some of my sketchbook development pages:


Admittedly, it perhaps was not the world's most original concept on paper, but there was some character and story stuff in the pitch that I really liked and will no doubt end up using somewhere, one day!

Sketchbook Scan #0011: ???

#0011: I honestly have no idea. (2008)

I can only assume this was some kind of psychological self-portrait.

Sketchbook Scan #0010: ZOMBIE THATCHER

#0010: Margaret Thatcher wants BRAAAAAAIIIIIIINNNSSSS. (2005)

This was part of an idea for a comic called Political Creatures which I did some art for, written by Internet Comics Rumourmonger Supreme (that is his offical title) Rich Johnston. It never actually got further than concept art and a few sample pages, but we got to go on telly talking about it anyway. This proves, if nothing else, that "Zombie Margaret Thatcher wants BRAAAAAIIIINNNNNSSS" is a pretty media-friendly high concept.

(Currently 'Transvestite Dwarf Santa' is the most popular entry search term for people randomly finding this blog, but I will be interested to see if 'Zombie Margaret Thatcher' overtakes it in future...)

Sketchbook Scan #0009: GIANT ROBOT SPIDER!

#0009: mecha design for Mo-Bot High, July 2008

This guy showed up in season 2 of Mo-Bot High. Here's the coloured up version / model sheet:

Random Sketchbook Scan #0008: The Incredible Mook

#0008: it's kind of a self-portrait, if I ever get hit by gamma rays. 2004

(This started as a copy of a Herb Trimpe Hulk cover, IIRC. I always remember Herb Trimpe as the reason I started drawing comics, because I looked at one of his issues of Transformers aged 6 or so and thought "Hell, I can draw better than that. The last quarter-century's experience has proved, amongst other things, that as a kid I was quite the idiot.)

Random Sketchbook Scan #0007: KUNG-FU WOLVERINE

#0007 Kung-Fu Wolverine, c.2003

Drawn in a very pleasant park in Melbourne, IIRC.

Random Sketchbook Scan #0006: The Doctor!

#0006: David Tennant face studies, 2008

Did I mention I am a bit of a nerd for Doctor Who?

Going to get that dude's face right one of these days, swear to god.

Digging in the Crates, #0004-0005

More random sketchbook scans!

Today's date from... circa 2007, I think, and are character designs and random doodlage for a story tentatively titled 'Flotsamville', which is kind of a martial arts fantasy adventure in the Mighty Thumpculture Manner...


#0004: some baddies!

#0005: our heroes!

There's also a tiger involved, I seem to recall.

I'll get to it one of these days...

EDIT: I've left my scrawly notes on here so as to give an accurate idea of what my sketchbooks look like. I have whole sketchbooks that actually end up mostly full of writing, which is probably kind of ass-backward. But anyway, don't read if you don't want some story I might get round to writing some day vaguely spoiled for you. I just felt I should put that warning in there.

Digging in the crates #0001-0003

I am currently in full-on Work Mode, which always tends to mean blogging kind of goes out of the window (along with any form of social activity or preparing meals more complex than a Scotch Egg Sandwich). Anyway, this seems kind of a shame, so thought I would start grabbing sketchbooks at random from my Big Brown Crate of Old Sketchbooks and posting them here.

#0001: a Geisha, plus Rakaa Iriscience and DJ Babu from Dilated Peoples. Circa 2004-2005(?)
#0002: Toshiro Mifune. Circa 2005?

#0003: Ill-advised attempts at aping Curt Swan / Wayne Boring, 2002

The last was part of my preparation for drawing An Hilarious Spoof strip written by James which was actually pretty funny but kind of went the way of all me and James' brilliant, hilarious collaborations: absolutely nowhere when we completely failed to finish or indeed start it.

More soon! As they get older they will only get more embarrassing!

Digital Paint Test

As I mentioned, a recent comics project was half set in a videogame-type world , which gave me an opportunity to try something I'd been wondering about for a while - "digital painting". Here is my first attempt, a quick test run on one of the character designs.


...look, it was a first effort.

Character Designage

Here are some character designs I did as prep-work for a recent comics assignment. The story was about a bunch of regular normal kids who spend a lot of time playing in an online sci-fi videogame, so there are two versions of each character - the 'real world' one and their online avatar kinda thing...

It was a fun project, as I got to use a very different style on the 'videogame' sections, and got to have a stab at doing a bit of digital painting, which is a new thing for me.


Maybe I'll post some of the comic pages up here in a bit!