Hmm, that title sounded funnier in my head... oh well...
If you look at a lot of my stuff you will probably notice that there are quite a few ideas and themes that emerge again and again. On the writing side I expect it's an unconscious thing that you're not aware of until you finish whatever you're writing sit back and look at it with a fresh eye. With the art my eyes are usually wide open, I wanna draw a flying car chase around an impossible city because it's exciting and fun.
One of my visual obsessions that I go back to again and again is rain. Must be something to do with coming from the UK where it rains all the time, especially when you don't want it to. It's more than that though, it's about setting the right atmosphere, it's reflections in the puddles that might also reflect a character's mood, it's about the challenge of depicting the cold and wet on a warm dry piece of paper or computer screen.
Here's some rain illustrations for you using some different techniques. This first one dates back to the mid 90s and was done with Indian ink on paper... The blur at the top of the picture was a happy accident caused by the scanner because the paper was slightly longer than A4 and didn't quite fit. I think it adds to the rain affect.
The next one is from around the same time. The line work was done with a drawing pen then colour added with marker pens. This didn't sit well with the ink from the drawing pen which caused the blurring around some of the inks and again added to the affect. I stole the colour pallet from a Jamie Hewlett Tank Girl in the rain poster in Deadline.
Not long after that one I discovered that if you use process white on a photocopy something in the carbon doesn't mix with it. Like oil in water, it bubbles and creates a nice rain affect. This is an early example. The cityscape was drawn in Indian ink with grey washes on A3, then photocopied and process white applied with a brush and ruler to the photocopy. I was so pleased with the affect I did it again and again and I'm still not sure if I got it out of my system.
Here's another from the time using the same technique showing a canal in Amsterdam... Yeah, it was a student trip!
This next one was a different kettle of fish altogether and took ages to do. Sadly lost to the mists of time it was a model I made in the summer of 1996. The figure was made in soft modelling clay then painted with acrylics. The wall he's sitting on and the floor was made with card and painted and the grassy bit was in painted clay. The fence was the painted up corrugated part from a cardboard box and the lightning sky was just a painted background. The whole lot was then coated in PVA glue which, when dry, gave it the shiny wet look. The rain itself was the hardest part to do. First I added a sort of roof to the display with a piece of card, then individually glued strings of white cotton from the 'roof' to the ground. It took ages and was very fiddly and annoying, but worth it as I was quite happy with the finished work. I've often thought it would be great fun to do a whole comic as a photo-strip with these sorts of models. What do you think? Would you like to read a whole story with this sort of technique, or should I just stick to drawing?
These next few are more recent and all digital art using Photoshop. They are all quick, simple inked line drawings that were scanned and worked up to what you see here. To begin with I made the grainy texture using the grainy tone on an old photocopy and pasted it onto the picture which I then worked into, taking a lot of the grain away. Then added another layer of the same texture and followed the same process, then repeated it several more times. what your doing here is building up the tone and creating depth as well as texture. Then using a few scans of the old rain pictures I created a two new rain textures, one white, one black. You can guess the next bit... I pasted and worked into a lot of rain layers to produce the finished piece.
This first one is from a photo of the bottom of the High Street in the small town I grew up in and the white building is one of it's five pubs, all of which I became quite familiar with back in my misspent youth during the late 80s early 90s. This one, called the Garibaldi, was established around 1760, and is quite small with two small bars and low ceilings and always a nice quietly friendly atmosphere. Last time I was there was in 2015 and it hadn't changed much.
CGUK round up-
Four teenage Knights Templar at the fag-end of the 20th Century, bringing in salvation the hard way.
The first two issues of Mary Boys are still In Demand on Indiegogo-
And you can sign up to the mailing list for the next Mary Boys comic here-
Next Time- Work, Work, Work!!
Coming Soon- Fred Fortune: City of Tomorrow
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