Androids

Howdy all! Well, now I have managed to fix the magic buttons that I used to make stuff happen up here on the net I can resume service, with pictures and nonsense at no extra charge!

Since I was last here properly I have been kept busy making art for many different things and people, from the mighty DC Comics to the awesome Marvel Comics, via the mercurial Archaia Press and stopping a good few times on the doorstep of the incredible Gutsville, tho the milk bottles and newspapers have piled up a bit there due to my absence. Hey, a dude's gotta pay the bills, and that Council Tax is a killer! Along my travels I have encountered many awesome things, including (but not limited to) Dr Strange, Batman, Tentacled things, Naked Ladies, Naked Men, Nanobots, ferrets and some sharks, and I will be displaying some of them on these here virtual pages over the next few weeks/months in the interests of enlightenment and promotion.

To start with tho, we have this little cover illo I drew for Boom! Studios. It was a variant cover for issue 10 of their adaptation of "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" or "dadoes" as I came to know it.

The brief was open, as long as it related to the story. I went with the simple idea of Deckard hunting Replicants in a huge crowd, and using colour to reveal which ones were normal and which ones were not. deckard himself also appears in colour, which is my nod to the ambiguity of the movie version where we were all left wondering "Hey, is he a robot too?". I admit, I never found out.

My editor (the Brilliantly named Ian Brill) said it was cool and it was all speed ahead on the finals! He will tell you that it did in fact take a while for me to get the final art done, which is in fact totally true. But the deadline was still met, and the book came out months later so it was all cool. Hey, there were reasons why it took so long: there's lots of fiddly people in it! I don't normally "do" detail but in this case I kinda had to, and it started slow.

 

Obv the main folks need the most detail, and what with this being a departure from Gutsville (which is what I had been working on at the time) it took a while to get the vibe. Please note the cute chick on the right. She is my "assistant"and has featured in some other comics I have made recently. 

As you can see above, the crowd is filling out. Tho I had real issues with who to populate it with! Even tho most will be specks, they had to actually *be* people, and it frazzled me little brane! I am not a natural Judge Dredd artist for this very reason, tho I do reckon the more of this I do the better I get at it. Next crowd scene I get, I will explore this.

Here's what I ended up with after aaaaages: a nice monochrome crowd scene with some blobs in the distance and some spooky shadows for buildings! All that remained was to add colour! And thanks to the magic of Photoshop CS4 (which is currently crashing far too much at the moment ¬_¬) this was easy.

Singling out the replicants was pretty much all the hard work I had to do at this stage, tho I did have issues regarding *what* colour to paint them. In the sketch they're all different colours but that didn't work as it made everything complicated. Hence the standard of "sorta reddish".

And for the arty ones among you, I have included 2 closeups of sections that I find interesting.

Anyway, I got bed to be going to. And when I awake, I have Bat-stuff to draw! Yaaaaaay!!!! Until next time, when I shall probably expose some secrets behind the art of the Bat-covers, I bid ye all a good-day or a good-night :)

F