gammahed: September 2014

Monday, September 29, 2014

Very rough stuff

These pages will change massively before they're ready to be released into the wild but I do quite like how mental they look now so, here you go.

Sunday, September 28, 2014

The Bomb

Another of my recent pictures that I'd like to do as a print... Plus Satanic variant...

Saturday, September 27, 2014

You might remember this thing. The palette I use in Photoshop that took me years to figure out. It's Cyan, Magenta and Yellow combinations in 25% increments and this is the best way I could figure out of how to generate all the possible combinations of the inks that the printing process uses to make colours.

I've uploaded this as a Photoshop ACO file so you can download it and use it yourself if you want it. But only for 7 days from now. I guess I can always repeat the process in the future if anyone's that interested in it... Link below... https://www.hightail.com/download/UlRUaXREQzdwaFJESjlVag?cid=tx-02002207340200000000&s=19102

The final battle

This is a page from Akay #4 along with a very early version of the first panel of the page...

A spot of Moebius colouring

From The Incal by Joderowsky and Moebius, an epic scene as the Meta-Baron enters the headquarters of AMOK to meet AMOK's queen.

And here's a detail, minus the line work...

Friday, September 26, 2014

ASTROGODS!

I had alot of fun with this. Just making up some crazy superheros to go up against my Celestial sorta guys... And the city is a bit wonky looking but I like it.

If you want to get a head...

Get a hat?

In The Back

More People Protector Akay art from part 3 of the story...

Jungle Action

A spot of additional art from Akay. I wanted something fairly neutral and background to be a bit of a contrast with all the bombast in the actual strip itself...

Nightworld

This was the double-page spread from Nightworld #1, still in the shops if you're lucky... By the time I'd got to what you see above I'd already spent many hours pasting together 4 seperate pieces of artwork from Paolo Leandri into one piece split into a few layers and alot of channels in one Photoshop Image.

I got rid of the spirits for a while using Photoshops "Exorcism" tool so I could just concentrate on the physical elements of the image.

Unticking the "Exorcism" box revealed the spirits again in more detail...

Tweak and reduce opacity a bit... nearly there now.

I restored the line-work in the background, which had been a hold, back to black and we're good to go. This took a while...

Check out http://www.nightworldcomic.com/

And also, here https://kyle-welch-c8u4.squarespace.com/blog/ where you can scroll down a bit and find an interview with Adam McG, the writer of this haunted tome.

Thursday, September 25, 2014

Orbits of Ephemera

Yes! It's a muscly blue cyclopean guy with a face on his chest riding a giant hairy white spider fighting a mob of unruly blobby demons! What more could you want from a comic?

"What happened to the American Dream?"

"You're looking at it!"

The original art for this was from one of the promo posters DC put out shortly before the Watchmen first started publication... I'd like to colour them all up at some point. They're all great. Artwork by Dave Gibbons, colours by me...

Doctor Arachnid

Doctor Arachnid was a story I wrote and drew for Dave Elliot's A1 mega book last year. I'd really like to do some more stories in that world at some point.

Akay in colour

This is how the first 6 pages of People Protector Akay look now. It's similar... But better I think.

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Early History of People Protector Akay

The spark that eventually burned up about 4 years of my life first came to light in the course of a conversation with Grant Morrison. He was visiting the studio with some black and white photocopies of the first issue of Final Crisis for us to all “Ooh” and “Ah!” at. Grant was talking about the opening and closing scenes of the book, at least as he'd planned the at the time: he was starting with Anthro, the first boy and was going to close the book with Kamandi, the last boy. It didn't work out that way, which is I think a bit of a shame.

Pre-history had become something of an obsession with me and I mentioned to Grant that almost every depiction of the dawn of mankind I found at once far-fetched and unimaginative. I'd mis-pronounced “Anthro” and “Afro”, and then jokingly covered up my mistake by saying that the first boy would've been black anyway, not a white kid running around in North America. I went on to wonder why there's never been a comic or a movie that depicted early humanity as black.

I reserved special annoyance for 2001. The proto-humans in that movie were just offensive. As was the nudge from the Monolith that started them towards becoming human. The hominid first use of technology was to pick up a bone and hit someone over the head with it. This was the primordial tool that eventually led to the craft that would transport us into Space and the stars. Technology was a product of violence. Hands were made to hold weapons and fashion more and better weapons so that we could better kill each other.

I disagreed.

So, Grant listened to me slag off all early human fiction and then quietly said, “Why don't you do something then? You could do a comic about that.”

So I did. It's taken a while and it's changed a lot since I first started writing and drawing the story. I wrote it and re-wrote it, started drawing it, only to realise it just wasn't right. So I broke it down and built it up again, rethought everything, rewrote it again and again and only when I thought it was good enough as a story did I start drawing it again.