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Page 33 of Fractal Friction is up.


It features a massive Red Dragon... you know what to do!

My Fractal Friction chums are doing an Art Swap, simply put, each has asked the others for a sketch and in return, you guessed it, they get a sketch... see? Art Swap, simple innit?

First up for me is James Corcoran who asked for The Spider... I'll be honest, I only vaguely knew this character existed and so, I'm not 100% sure I've done him justice.
To me this looks like the Count from Sesame Street and there are a couple of obvious things wrong with it as well, but I set myself the task of doing each sketch within a quarter of an hour, I've done them all now and none took more than about 30-40 minutes. I'm pretty happy with them as sketches and I'll post them up as I receive each of my requests.


In return for The Spider, James has already done me this lovely rendition of Jenny Simmons from Caballistics, Inc. Caballistics, Inc. is a 2000ad strip, a fabulously dark paranormal and supernatural story written by Gordon Rennie and drawn by Dom Reardon... if you haven't read it, I can thoroughly recommend it as a sort of UK version of the Hellboy spin-off BPRD.

It was my turn again on Fractal Friction this week. I actually finished the inks for this last thursday and colours on friday, but for obvious reasons couldn't share it until now... well, I sneaked that one edited panel out.


I knew this page was taking place in another dimension, so I thought I'd try a slightly different inking style... and as we were awakening the once and future King, I thought it needed some serious magic mood too. It was a bit of an experiment in using more black areas as well.
The colour palette I chose, again, was supposed to be a bit moody and magical, I was also trying to get a bit of a hint of the colour palette that John Higgins and Sally Hurst have been using in 2000ad... you can judge whether I achieved that here.

It was a really cool page to be doing, the major problem was getting Arthur to look regal and identifiable - 'cos I knew he would be nekkid, and without his crown. The concept for this page was also a real collabrative effort and took place across the e-mail with all of my Fractal Friction cohorts chipping in ideas for how we could 'grow' our new King Arthur!

Cor! Can you believe we are up to page 21?!?!!
For those of you interested in this sort of thing... Here are the original pencils, including the panel that was revised.


And here are the inks.


If you want to see what a spot of colour did to these inks, head on over to Fractal Friction to see the finished page...

Here are my inks for Fractal Friction page 8 - available to read in glorious full colour over at the Fractal Friction main blogsite.


What do you mean, you're still not reading it!

She's off again, but this time in colour.

The page is being lettered by Jim Campbell now! Gentlemen, start your engines, this where the fun begins!

Start reading Fractal Friction!

A rough sketch for an 'exit' panel from my next page for Fractal Friction



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