Drawing Business » Diary

More new designs on my RedBubble store

Administrator — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 13:30:13 +0000

I’ve recently added two new images to my RedBubble store, and they are both available as t-shirts and hoodies, children’s cloths, stickers and cases for the iPhone 4 and 4S.

Strawberry blonde is a character I created several years ago for a mobile phone game by bitBull. She was based on my Manga Fairy, which was I piece of spec work for a book illustration commission (I didn’t get the job).

Strawberry Blonde

Manga Fairy

Finally, something new…

Administrator — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 22:00:36 +0000

I’ve had to move my computer into a new room now that my daughter needs my old space, and I’ve not really had the time to do any drawing since her birth 5 months ago. My new location means that I don’t have space for a drawing board or a scanner either, so I’ve been forced into an all-digital workflow for the first time at home.

Tonight though, I found a few hours to sit down and start sketching a character for a book idea that I’m tentatively working on with a friend. I’m finding sketching using just my Intuos tablet quite challenging at the moment. It’s not as direct or natural as using pencil and paper, or the Cintiq I use at work. I’m getting the hang of it, but I find I’m much slower using the tablet, and can’t hack away with the stylus as I do with a pencil. But hopefully, if I persevere with it, hopefully the fluidity will return.

Here’s my first sketch. Hopefully I’ll get to add some colour soon.

Character Sketch

Getting it covered

Administrator — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 20:02:21 +0000

I’ve been working fairly intensively on the cover artwork for my FutureQuake story, and it’s getting close to completion now. Just the background to paint, and a few tweaks to make to the character. Here’s a sample of the work in progress (I’ve just slapped in a masthead from a previous edition to help with the layout):

FutureQuake Cover Art in Progress

Let me know what you think.

Flick Golf riding high

Administrator — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 20:40:08 +0000

It’s been very satisfying watching Flick Golf riding high in the US iTunes App Store. It’s currently at number 8 in the Top Paid chart, after peeking earlier last week at number 3. At that point, it was even beating Cut the Rope, which is quite an achievement.

Screenshot of Flick Golf

Flick Golf is the third iPhone release from my employer, Full Fat, and the first I’ve been involved with. Our first two iPhone titles, Deadball Specialist (featured by Apple in the Rewind 2010 and App Store Essentials), and Zombie Flick received excellent reviews, but neither have achieved the success of Flick Golf.

I designed and created the logo for Flick Golf, along with all the interactive elements of the game UI (buttons, titles, dialogue panels, etc). The wonderful loading screen images and UI backgrounds where created by Heather Sheppard (who you can also find on Twitter masquerading as DinobotTwit), who also painted the beautiful background for this Flick Golf marketing poster (click the image for a huge version):

Swanky marketing poster

It’s very nice to be involved, even if only in a small way, in a product that has been so successful, and received consistently high praise from reviewers and casual gamers alike.

Back to the Future

Administrator — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 22:06:00 +0000

Or more accurately, back to the FutureQuake. For the last few weeks, I’ve been beavering away on the finished artwork for my strip; all five pages are now inked, and have the flat tone applied to them. I’ve also completed the shading on page one. You can see a sample of the finished result below:

Extract from the finished first page

I wish I had time to revisit some of the panels that I’m not so happy with, but it’s difficult enough to grab time in the evenings and weekends to work on it. My workload has been increased even further by the editor asking me to paint the cover for the next issue, something that I’m very thrilled to be doing.

I’ve completed the initial sketch for the cover image (below), and will be getting on with painting it as soon as I’ve sorted out my damned tax return. The cover is full colour, full bleed, so it will be an interesting challenge.

Psion’s Lament

Reaping the reward of prior effort

Administrator — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 11:50:52 +0000

Page four of my FutureQuake is now done, and I’ve finally remembered why I spent so much time modelling the heroine’s space ship using Google SketchUp. The ship features quite heavily in this page, and with such a complex design, constructing the last two panels in particular would have been very time consuming. With the model made, all I had to do was position the camera, print out the ship at the right size, then draw the heroine and her surroundings over the top. Once the sketch was scanned, it was very easy to drop the renders of the ship onto the sketch and mask out the unwanted sections. I think the end result is well worth the effort I invested in making the model (of course the experience I gained using SketchUp wouldn’t have been a waste – learning is good – but it’s nice to finally put the model to good use).

Page 4

I used a render taken from inside the ship to create the interior shot too; it was useful to get the perspective and overall shape set up before filling in the interior by hand. I wish I’d had time to model the interior too, but as it’s only seen properly in one panel, it would only have been useful as an intellectual exercise, and the finished panel will be dark and smoke filled enough to hide any wonkiness in my perspective.

This will probably be the last panel I post, as I don’t want to give away the end of the story until it has been seen in print (something I’m excessively excited about).

Comic strip: page 3

Administrator — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 14:50:10 +0000

After taking the decision to redesign the principle character, it’s taken me a while to get this page finished, as I’d already drawn it using the original version of Psion. This page also features a revised version of her main protagonist; I thought his design was a bit weak too, so I’ve made him look a bit more useful. I’ve based his face on one of my favourite actors, but it’s only a passing likeness.

Page 3

I’m glad I decided to redesign Psion; I feel a lot more positive about this page now that I’ve updated her outfit. The only issue I have is with the sword strike in panel 4; I think I need to revisit this to add a bit more movement to the pose. She doesn’t look like she’s used much effort to make such a devastating cut.

To the root of the problem

Administrator — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 14:35:54 +0000

I’ve found myself in something of a malaise whilst creating the pencils for my FutureQuake strip, and have felt distinctly lacklustre about the first two pages. At the end a fantastically unproductive Friday I realised what the problem was; I simply don’t like my original design of Psion (the main character). Specifically, I don’t like her outfit. The body armour looks heavy, clumsy and uncomfortable, and her sword (a key feature of the story) looks feeble and cheap too.

So, I decided to bite the bullet and spend a few hours this morning redesigning her costume. Rather than trying to create her costume “cold” (that is, entirely from my own imagination), I spent about half an hour downloading reference images of motocross body armour, motorbike gear (modern racing boots look like something off Star Trek; not like 15 years ago, when I was riding: back then, leather Wellington Boots were the order of the day), weapons and swimming costumes. Here is the result of mashing all that reference together:

Front View

Rear View

A lot more exposed skin, a lot less rigid-looking body armour, and a honking great “photon” sword. I think she looks at lot more lithe and flexible now and, dare I say it, a little sexier too (an important trait for any comic book heroine). I’m feeling much more positive about her look now, and raring to get the remaining pages finished. Of course, I have to redraw all the images of Psion I’ve done so far, but I can just trace over the existing poses and Photoshop the new appearance in to place before I start inking. I think it’s worth investing a little extra time to get it looking right, rather than feeling disappointed with the finished result.

What I haven’t done, of course, is succeed in making her any easier to draw. And I still can’t decide on one small detail: gloves, or bare hands?

And now, page two…

Administrator — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 16:19:47 +0000

Here is page two of my FutureQuake strip. Pencilling them is taking longer than I thought (I had hoped to do a page a day, not a page every two days), but I’m getting faster as I go along, so hopefully I can back on track. It’s a long time since I did any comic book illustration, but I’m slowly getting back into the groove.

Page 2

At last, the first page…

Administrator — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:50:25 +0000

I’ve finally completed the pencil for the first page of my Furturequake comic book, written by Neil Merrett.

Page 1

I’m not sure about the close-up of the heroine’s eyes yet (they look too masculine, I think), but I’ll come back to that panel when I’ve completed the remaining 4 pages.