Bittersweetfatkid

I haven’t spent enough time in sketchbooks just drawing recently, so am warming myself back up. Here are a couple of US Office character sketches from tonight.

After much shameful stopping and starting, I’m finally in the home stretch in terms of art for the first issue of The Whale House, the comic I’m working on with the excellent Andrew Cheverton, author of the fantastic and critically acclaimed indie series West.

I won’t spoil any of it by posting entire pages, but here are a few jpegs I’ve managed to clip.

A few reviews with kind words have appeared during the first few months of Video Nasties being available, so I decided to try and show them off. The image is simply a blown up and coloured panel from issue 6.

I’ve lowered the price to £7.00, too, so for the time being you can grab the whole thing for a measly £9.99 at Lulu.com. Go on.

Evan got his first (to my knowledge) cameo recently in the third issue of Terry Wiley’s fantastic VerityFair. I’d drawn Verity as a fellow passenger of Evan’s in the final issue of Video Nasties, so it was satisfying that the thread of cameos on public transport continued. There are another couple of cameos in that panel of mine; but the characters are so off-model, I’d be embarrassed to admit them. I’ll do a better job next time, guys.

It was brilliant seeing Terry’s take on Evan, as he’s been a big name in British indie comics for years. I always remember seeing his name and work in the review section of Comics World (or Comics Zone or whatever it changed it’s name to) in the mid nineties, which was always inspiring me to try comics myself. His Tales from Sleaze Castle series is a great read and from what I gather, will be released in a digital format soon. Get on it.

I’ve been playing lots of Arkham City recently and love Batman in general, so when I saw James Howard championing #drawbatman on Twitter, I really wanted to take part. He’s compiled them all here. My personal favourites so far are James’ themselves, Jonathan Edwards’, Warwick Johnson Cadwell’s and Paul Harrison Davies’.

I inked this straight into photoshop over a small sketch, and it turned out quite differently. I’ve dropped the original sketch below.

After sitting in gestation for a while, the complete Video Nasties is now available from Lulu! Money’s too tight at the moment for a self published print run (it’s quite a fat book), so print on demand seems like the ideal option.

Originally the collection was set to be published by Blank Slate, but as the story progressed, there was a concern that it might not fit within their stable due to it’s tone. When I completed it, there was talk of just going ahead and printing it anyway, but because of the slight uncertainty that was there I opted to try and work on something else to replace it. Which is where I’m at now.

So you can buy your physical copy for £10 (plus p&p) or Ebook for £5 right here. Whenever possible, I’ll tweet Lulu discount codes that’ll get you money off. They’re a pretty regular thing.

A few weeks ago I somehow managed to get the far braver than me Dan Berry to start the drawcoop meme on Twitter after posting the above sketch. I’d spent about two days trying to draw Special Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks, and this was the best I did.

Although it doesn’t look dead on as far as likenesses go, I think I got the character down. My personal criteria for a successful Coop was if I could hear his voice come out of any of the faces I was drawing – and I could with this one.

Comprehensive fan site Welcome to Twin Peaks spotted the Coops and blogged a collection of them. There’s some brilliant ones.

I did this with the intention of submitting it to the brilliant Covered blog, but after completing it realised I wasn’t 100% on it. Positive reaction on Twitter’s convinced me to post it up here.

It’s not an iconic cover, really, I just remember walking into the newsagent and being really excited to see it. I remember it being the cover to the first issue – and all four Ghostbusters spinning about – so it was surprising when I hunted the cover down and found out it was actually issue two. The original cover’s below, from the Ghostbusters wikia.