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It's that time of year again.


I've just sent out my e-card to (hopefully) all of my friends, family, clients and collaborators etc.

En-masse e-mail delivery paranoia demands that I state here that if you haven't received the card, feel you should have or would like to receive it next year... please do that which is necessary to alert me, fix your filters and/or notify your e-mail provider that I'm not spam!

It's a truly awful pun, but that is, in-keeping with festive or seasonal jokes found in crackers...

The initial idea was just a horrible cardigan made into a card, like so many 'Christmas jumpers' of my youth - after sketching a perplexed and generic 'every-man' holding up said offending garment, it occurred that the real joke was in the misunderstanding. Why it became Peter Parker and MJ is anybody's guess, but my guess would fall firmly in the camp of "because I like drawing girls".

The usual 'stages' stuff follows:

digital roughs

sketch-up lounge guide

final digital "pencils"

inks

All the very best of the season to you all, have a good one!

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You know this is what you'll really do:


I did this, this afternoon before the news broke about The News of the World ceasing publication... seems sort of more appropriate now.

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Now in Technicolor!

I'm just about done on the Wizard of Oz, Judge Dredd and Johnny Alpha cross-over commission.


There's still a decision to be made over the final dialogue though...

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Here's something a bit different from my usual stuff. My good friend Russ asked if I would do a spoof of the fabulous Traction Man is Here by Mini Grey, using him as the subject for his girlfriend Clare's birthday.


Emulating Mini Grey (to a certain extent) and trying to get enough of a likeness was a really enjoyable challenge.

If you haven't read Traction Man, please do follow the link above and invest in a copy - you won't regret having dazzle painted battle pants in your life!

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This post marks the third birthday of my blog. Weirdly, this is also post 333, does that make it 50% evil?!

A good pal said to me over the seasonal break that he would like to see my take on The Dude, from the Coen Bros. fabulous The Big Lebowski.
I've got a real soft spot for The Dude, His Dudeness or El Duderino (if you're not into the whole brevity thing).

Like the film itself, there was a nice syncronicity to events, my friend's birthday is tomorrow, my blog would be 3 today, it was a nice quick sketch that I knew he was after and that suited my current status of waiting for feedback on the project I'm working on. Nothing was f**cked, So I drew him a card!


I don't think I've quite captured what I was after, but Jeff Bridges is a tricky chap to depict, even trying to get an essence of The Dude is a tall order... the desire to include (clever) quote related 'in jokes' was definitely not satisfied and originally I intended to do a group shot including Walter and Donny too, but sometimes you eat the bar and sometimes... well, he eats you!

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AHA! - I FREEKIN' TOLD YOU DOUBTERS! It's all over the headlines - the new Artist of the Year.  *WARNING* - if you're a Vampire, do not look directly at this link.

And you thought I was just being paranoid - making up some ridiculous story about J.B. Now what do yo have to say about it? Do you really think it's just coincidence that he was named Artist of the Year right after I let the Vampire secret out about him?  I'm telling you - this is all part of a mass conspiracy to wipe Vampires out!! I'm keeping tabs on you J.B.

But enough of that phony. Like I told you last week, I'm living at Garth's house now and have to share a bedroom with the dweeb. He's a major league slob! The room completely wreaks of bottles that are half filled with old blood. I bet you didn't know mold could grow over blood if it's left out long enough. Plus, that idiot has nightmares every night about the clinical trial he signed up for that turned him into a Vampire. He wakes up screaming and crying, like a little girl. You'd think he'd be traumatized about accidentally turning ME, but that he is just fine with.

Mom came over for Thanksgiving this week. Her and Aunt Celia (that's Garth's mom) felt bad that we couldn't have a proper holiday dinner like them, so Mom went out and bought a bottle of 'Vampire Wine'.

She figured it was just a fancy bottle of blood for the holidays, so her and Aunt Celia let us drink that while they pigged out on turkey.

Turns out it wasn't blood. In fact, we didn't know it was real wine until we started getting light headed, but by that time it was too late! Me and Garth ended up getting really drunk. We started burping and farting at the dinner table, cracking ourselves up as we finished the bottle.

So things might have gotten a little out of hand. Garth has some older friends who told him that when guys drink too much, they get 'Beer Muscles'. That means they start acting real tough - picking fights with bigger guys and stuff like that. Luckily that doesn't happen to Vampires, but I found out the hard way something that does.

'Beer Fangs' make Vampires believe they are much scarier than they actually are. Me and Garth got bored just sitting around the dinner table and started chasing our moms around like we were going to bite them. Of course we were kidding, but they didn't find it very funny and kicked us out of the house. And during Thanksgiving Dinner! We didn't care though, our Beer Fangs had given us a great idea.

We decided to walk over to the movie theater to see what the chick situation was like since we were feeling extra smooth from the Beer Fangs and all. Garth even suggested a great idea for me to kick it old-school with two of the hottest chicks at the theater - the Stygian Twins. I'm pretty sure they're models. I pulled out my Dracula cape

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Over on the 2000ad forums, the monthly art comp is something I usually intend to contribute to... but I seldom find the time these days. This month, it's such a good theme - mash-ups/crossovers and I had what I thought was a pretty good idea. A twitter spoof!


So I enlisted the services of my good pal and frequent collaborator Rich Clements and made time!

For the uninitiated, twitter reads from the bottom up... so you'll need to click the image, zoom in and scroll to the bottom to start!

I really hope you enjoy reading this as much as Rich and I did producing it!

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Warren Ellis is running a fun competition over on his web forum.


The brief:
You are an artist/designer. You have to put together the cover for the first issue of a weekly science-fiction anthology comic called 2000AD. You don't know much about what's in it. You've been given the following pieces of information to include on the cover somehow:
"featuring the new DAN DARE"
"M.A.C.H. 1 - his incredible hyperpower will amaze you!"
"SPACE-AGE DINOSAURS! Read 'FLESH' "
"STOP PRESS! GREAT BRITAIN INVADED!"
The cover must include a logo and the numbering, which you've been told is not the usual "issue one," but "Programme 1."

I thought it would be funny if Dan Dare had been a girl for the relaunch... The image is from something I did previously, but didn't want to show here at the time.

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Over on the 2000AD forums a really great idea was put forward by Pete Wells of the 2000AD covers uncovered blog fame - each day during December, one or more board member will post something into an "advent calendar" topic. Pete has already posted his 1st December Judge Dredd X-mas movie epic and I'm certainly excited to see what else is in store... here is my effort for today's door!


I thought I'd celebrate one of my favourite new stories of 2009 - the terrific Zombo created by Henry Flint and written by Al Ewing.

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The current topic for DrawerGeeks is Frankenstein's Monster.


Having done a version of the monster once or twice before, I was reluctant to tread the same ground.
Unfortunately as my idea arrived a bit late in the day yesterday, I've only partially finished it. I think it illustrates the concept though and I'm fairly happy with it - hopefully I'll get the chance to finish it up properly, but it's joining a long 'to do' list!

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Over on the 2000AD forums, they have a monthly art competition. This month is cover-recreations or "cover versions"... Basically anything you want to do: a straight recreation or a mix up with 2000AD characters and albums, dvds or book covers - even other comics...
I've chosen to do a cover that never was - but potentially should have been... Fink Angel, one of my all time favourite Dredd-world villains first appeared in prog 193. The initial story ran for 4 progs, but Fink would return again...


In the story, a cover to a newspaper falls into Fink's hands alerting him that his estranged family have all been sentenced to death by Judge Dredd - well naturally, being the Cursed Earth homicical maniac that he is, he sets out to avenge his kin!

There has been some corking entries already and I've thrown last month's recreation of prog 310 into the mix already. Something rattled around my goldfish memory and reminded me that I'd done another (samle) cover for 2000AD...

Last July - very nearly a year to the day in fact... I presented this to the blogging fraternity.
That was when the light went on in my brain and I knew what I wanted to be for the first time in over a decade. Looking at this - I can see how much more accomplished the Fink cover is in comparison - nothing really wrong with this Dawn of the Dead spoof...
but I feel like I've come such a long way in what has surprisingly been only a year!

Oddly enough there are some pretty strong compositional similarities in these two pieces... a slight twist where the villain is the wide-stanced focus (although he shares some of those quirky zombie characteristics) and the "hero" is in the background - other wise there's not much to tell, which I think means that the basics of my approach aren't that different and I am just honing my skills.

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I decided to have some fun with a spoof, pulp-fiction paperback cover to an imaginary spin-off book.



There's a bigger version of this over on the Taormina blog where you can see the cover in better detail.

I did some searching around for covers from mass market paperbacks to help with this, I hope I've struck the right balance.

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How the hell does this qualify as "sail"??? that's what you're asking...





These were some storyboards I did recently as a tryout for a media company... I reworked thumbnails from a storyboard for an advert that didn't get made. I had to keep quiet about these for a month or so but I think it's ok to show them now.

The idea was that this was the battle of Waterloo (or a pastiche of that battle) and the two generals/leaders rode out and had a bit of a verbal slanging match - much to their men's entertainment. Obviously the side that won was fuelled by some form of dutch courage (the beer that was trying to be marketed) or maybe that was simply the incentive or the spoils of victory...

Put simply, the generals assailed each other... or perhaps the Duke of Wellington ("There's only one way to win a war, Shout, Shout and SHOUT AGAIN! MEEAHH!" [Blackadder the Third]) assailed himself on Napoleon... Yeah, tenuous, I know.

The b&w panels took about 8hrs in total, hence why some of them a pretty rough, the final (larger) panel is a tidied up version of the soldiers done to show a more 'glossy' option for the ad company to sell their concept to the client and probably took another three of four to complete.

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On Saturday they were going to turn on The Large Hadron Collider. This is a massive particle accelerator which will be used to observe and study the smallest particles known to man...

There is some talk that they are going to use it to try to recreate the circumstances of the big bang!

There are mixed views of what actually turning it on will mean. With the scientists looking forward to seeing some results from the $ 8billion investment and other parties proclaiming that the world will be sucked into an artificially produced black hole...



I don't know much about the physics of this, but it sounds like a crazy sci-fi movie where these well-meaning boffins came up with an idea and just did it. You know, after realizing that they could do it, they didn't actually stop to consider if they actually should... and now we're all gonna die horribly or in this case vanish in a puff/poof of logic.

For more info on the LHC simply search 'Large Hadron Collider' into any good search engine... in some news reports it looks like they've postponed the apocalypse until 21st October now!

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I took the Han Solo I did previously, gave him a body and added his old pal Chewbacca... This is another reasonably rough digital sketch for fun.

The poses were taken from some old Episode IV publicity shots I found floating around on the web. I love Chewie's vaguely knock-kneed apathy compared to Harrison's cock-sure hero stance.

I'd really like to see the adventures of Han and Chewie (before they got involved with that Skywalker boy) as opposed to the stuff that Lucasfilm seems to be producing currently. I don't know whether I'll go and see The Clone Wars and I'm not holding my breath for the Star Wars TV series coming sometime around 2011!

The Adventures of Han Solo and Chewbacca...

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At the end of last week I discovered a great blog called The Big Beautiful Wonder Woman Blog. The project is run by Jamar Nicholas who says of the blog: "I admire and enjoy the female form in all its sizes, especially ladies with some meat on them. Thus, my idea for collecting art of a bigger-sized Wonder Woman happened..."

He encourages submissions by other artists, and after the Superman redesign I was itching to draw another superhero.


This little project fit the bill perfectly. I wanted to show a big buxom, sexy, wonder woman who was definitely in the larger sizes, it seemed a natural progression to make this into a spoof cover of all those waif-encouraging magazines.

I really enjoyed this, I hope you will too.

•••EDIT•••
Jamar has posted my entry up on the BBWWB along with some truly humbling comments, thanks man!

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A hoard of Bonds?

James Brawn

Double O Saving

Doublet Status

Eye Spy

Bond of Marriage

Bawned, Jaymsh Bawned
the original and still the best!

My Puns aren't great, but some of the others I had were worse - Double O Suaving, Oh, Oh Heaven and Sleak Rat Agent for example were awful. Have a go at coming up with witty alternatives for 007's names, it's not as easy as you think.

I'm really happy with Sean, Daniel and Pierce. These are all quick Photoshop efforts, I did colour for Sean and Daniel as they are the book ends for the character and I'm just playing at the moment, trying to gauge how successful/commercial these things might be.

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You'd better pray that this baby never comes to visit you...

Seemed like a brilliant movie title until I looked up on IMDb, there was a movie called the PACIFIER and it starred Vin Diesel, I think I'd rather see a film with this baby in it!

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Here's the charm I made for Sheri, and I get her lovely domino charm in exchange! These are my small objects as they started out - plain wooden tile and several buttons from my sewing basket.


Here's how they were altered. In addition to painting the little fish, I painted the buttons, and threw in a few extras - crystals and the starfish. Oh, and a lobster clasp to make it easier to hook onto a charm bracelet. I also applied a thin coat of gloss varnish over the painted pieces.

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