Stem Cell Comic - Colour

I'm currently putting in the colour for the comic on Stem Cell research I'm working on.  I've not coloured a project this big before, but it's been a lot of fun so far and I'm quickly getting used to the process.  I've been using a 64 colour palette to start off with, inspired by the advice of Tom Humberstone.  From there I've added more colours and shades as needed, but always while keeping an eye on limiting the palette.

Maps to Live By - Making of

Solipsistic Pop vol. 4 is just about to be released to the public.  We received our advance copy the other day and I have to say it's more wonderful than I imagined.  Editor Tom Humberstone has crafted a top class anthology, and the artists involved have all pushed their work into new and interesting places.  It's on a par with any comics anthology I've ever seen, reminding me of the quality seen in the pages of Best American Comics or RAW, and it showcases a breadth of talent that evinces the healthy state of U.K. comics today.

I'm really proud to be a part of it.

I thought it would be nice today to talk about the making of my own piece for the anthology.  For most of my comics career so far I've been creating documentary style comics, mostly about film theory and parasitology.  It's an exciting niche to work in, but one that trains certain tendencies and neglects others.  My work up until this year had generally been very un-sequential and has had very little storytelling in it.  This year I decided to work those other muscles, first with my wordless piece for Paper Science 5, and then with this, my short story Maps To Live By.

The story was sparked off when I met up with Tom in May while he was planning this fourth volume of the exemplary anthology.  Over a game of the Battlestar Galactica Boardgame (honestly, it's amazing) he talked about his idea for the volume.  The theme of maps struck me straight away, as well as his insistence that the artists should explore more complex formal and narrative themes than in the previous kid friendly edition.

I started to see in this a story of my family's complex maps: my Grandfather's childhood in India, the son of a Scottish man and an Indian woman; my father's childhood in Scotland, with his Anglo-Indian father and Swiss mother.  It wasn't just the idea of physical maps of course, but those deeper, more complex maps we experience: the maps of race and culture and identity that we're expected to read, follow and understand every day.  It was the idea of receiving a map you're not sure what to do with, or a set of maps that conflict with each other, and show you there's no simple route to follow.

This family history I'd explored before in my autobiographical project '100 Tiny Moments From My Past, Present and Future', and it was a theme that I felt and still feel has more to be said about it.  These are ideas and debates that sit right at the heart of my family's experience of the world, and I wanted to look at them through this comic book lens.

I immediately knew as well that this story needed to be told by both myself and my father, Peter.  It's his story at the heart of all this, and his voice that told the tale to me.  These events have been part of the family oral history.  Very little of this is written down, and what was interesting is that as we compared notes with the documentation that does exist, we found that not everything added up.  Thus, this story is not so much a factual reconstruction of events, as a continuation of that oral history, complete with those half-truths, grey areas and convenient fabrications that exist in every family's story of itself.

The writing process was a fantastic experience.  Peter and I would meet up with these half formed ideas and chip away at the scenes we'd imagined.  We work well together, and it was amazing confronting all these pieces of family history, and getting to know each other better in the process.  I'd say the writing of it was more like sculpture than anything.  We started by trying to put it all into words, soon finding that a better way was to piece together the pictures and words simultaneously.

We actually moved the writing into the physical space, printing off the sketches I'd done in Photoshop and re-arranging them on the carpet, re-writing them as the pieces slowly sifted together.

Then, I'd work up a more finalised composition of panels and content..

Before moving on to the digital pencilling process.  A lot of these images were based on real family photos, hopefully giving the scenes an air of authenticity.

Finally I inked and coloured the piece.

I don't want to give too much of the piece away, so I'm going to leave it at that.  It was certainly the most complex and challenging comic I've ever written, in so many ways.  From the layouts and narrative structure, through to the content itself, I've tried to do my best to live up to both the nuance and complexity of the story we took on, and to the quality of the artists on show in this latest edition of Solipsistic Pop.

I definitely recommend ordering a copy when it comes out, so keep your eyes on the website here or on my twitter, since I'll no doubt talk about this once it's out.
 

I should also finish by saying thanks to everyone who helped in the making of this short comic, which was such a big undertaking:  Mary and Margaret for checking it over and making sure it made sense, Tom Hunt for his input and advice on the story, and Anita for digging around the family history.

Filmish Issue 3 Teaser 4.

Above is a panel from Filmish 3.  I've moved almost entirely into illustrating in the computer, which has allowed me to be be a bit more adventurous and at the same time create much more refined images.  It'll be interesting to see these images in print, and how they actually compare to the largely hand-drawn issues 1 and 2.

The Professor and the Trypanosome.

I just recently did a portrait of a retiring professor who studies some of the parasites I covered in the Parasites! comic.  This was the first image I've ever drawn entirely in the computer, using my new Intuos tablet.

I set the Photoshop pen up to draw like a pencil, before going on to 'ink' the image on a separate layer once I was happy with my pencils.  Using the techniques I use to draw on paper I was able to achieve a piece of work as good as, if not better than I would normally produce through drawing on paper and later scanning into the computer.

Solipsistic Pop 3 Preview

I've just finished my contribution to Volume 3 of the Solipsistic Pop anthology series.  You'll be able to see the full piece when the collection comes out in November.  In the meantime here's a little preview.

We were asked to work with two spot-colours (black and Pantone 485 U) which get combined in the printing process to produce a whole range of different tones.  Used to just picking my own colours, it was interesting and eye-opening to be creatively constrained in this way.  I think by far it made my work better, and the final look of the piece is far more cohesive as a result.  I think it's an approach I'll take far more in the future, limiting myself to a carefully selected and considered palette.  I can't wait to see what the other artists come up with.

Will Pickvance and Friends Flyer Design.

I was recently asked by Edinburgh based musician Will Pickvance to design a flyer for his upcoming Fringe show.  He asked me, having seen my work illustrating him for the Screen Bandita's 'Eruption of Kilauea' event.

"International pianist and entertaininer Will Pickvance raises a merry Hell bang in the middle of St. John’s cavernous crypt for an enchanting two hours of candle-lit carnival.

Stride piano outbursts one minute, heart-breaking laments the next, Will invites concert violinists, todays’ troubadours, the talented, the skilled and the thirsty to entertain you with Festival Vaudeville and Helium Karaoke.

With different acts each night, selected from the cream of this year’s Festival, you never know who you’ll be sharing a table with.  Come and see the Albert Hall squeezed into your local pub."

The visual idea came quickly, based on Will's descriptions of his mad, chaotic, carnivalesque shows, and the revelation that Will often wears a grotesque pig mask for parts of his act.  I developed the idea from an initial sketch (seen below) and then drafted it out properly, before inking it (partly with a new brush pen I'm experimenting with).

However, this first version wasn't quite doing it for Will, or for me.  After some tinkering, we came up with the image below.  The crowd is now full of interesting characters, instead of gray silhouettes, and the addition of a major female presence balances out the image better, and adds more visual variety.

Also, spot the little cameo!

Will's show should be quite an event, and I'm excited to be going to see it, having already illustrated it blind.  Check out the poster for details, or visit www.mostentertaining.com.

100 Tiny Moments From My Past, Present and Future.

Things are going well with my 100 days pledge. Unfortunately it means other projects are showing signs of neglect. You can see all the comics over at 100tinymoments. Here's some of my personal favourites from the past 34 days...




Above: The first tiny moment where I flash forward into my future. It's strange, but visualising your own demise is quite enjoyable. It's the catharsis of it, I guess. Stop worrying, start imagining.

Above: One of my most favourite, but maybe others found it less entertaining. I just like the visual simplicity of it, the lack of pretension and the sense of fun. The last few days have not quite presented me with such small joys, and I guess I'm a little jealous of my past self.



Above: One of my most moving strips, and a big departure from others, it being entirely digitally painted over an old photo. Day to day it's hard to maintain such a high standard, and I don't think I've met this one since, at least on a visual and technical level.


Above: A piece of New Years Eve sentimentality. A vision of the future not involving my death or decay. I featured some of my friends in the pictures: Jamie got beardy, Tom with a scar and a son, Adrian looking just the same and Pete with middle-aged chubby cheeks. I dunno, it just makes me happy looking at the future this way, even if it'll probably turn out so different.

Godzilla.

I borrowed a Wacom Tablet to see how they worked. I decided to colour a panel from Monsters! as practice and this is how it turned out. I had to re-draw the bottom half of Godzilla with the tablet, and once I got the pressure sensitivity working it became obvious that this can be a very useful tool!

Raise Your Hem Unite

The final colour image for the Screen Banditas event. Each band member was drawn separately but they seem to unite pretty well in the same image. The original pictures were taken by Evi Tsiligaridou on Portobello beach in Edinburgh, right near my childhood home!


I'm looking forward to the event:

The Eruption of Kilauea and Other Treasures.

Venue: St Cecilia’s Hall (Niddry Street, Edinburgh)
Date: 30th October 2009, 19.30
Tickets: £4/£3 (Can be bought on the door or in advance at Edinburgh Filmhouse.)

Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

A favourite current technique is to scan in crumpled paper textures to give an image a bit of tangibility. It looks really good on this image. It looks a bit like I just found the picture in the bin and stuck in online.

I love their name by the way...

In The Mood For Love

An image based on the poster for the Wong Kar-wai classic In The Mood For Love. I used found textures around the house for the clothing, bacakdrop and skin. Photoshop allows us to add so much visual depth to an image.
I've been meaning to do a series of these, but I've not been able to decide on another poster to use. It's such a simple and elegant initial image that captures the tender and wistful relationship of the two characters perfectly.

Wisconsin, 1895.

The documentary Wisconsin Death Trip is one of the most atmospheric and unique American films I've seen in years. With our view of the Old West so shaped by cowboy movies, it's a revelation to see a film that shows us the day to day moments of melancholy and quiet pain that normal people lived. The idea inspired a short comic, that's still forming in my head. I managed to draw a first page though...



An example here of me using the computer for good rather than evil. All my colours are done in photoshop. In this case, I also used the program to tweak the composition, and the original hand drawn images were really just props that I later moved around in the computer. I think it turned out really well, and sets the tone for the story to come nicely.

Reel Iraq

The second comic I did for the Filmhouse. I was less pleased with this one. Time and space constraints meant I could only do a six panel piece. Not really enough room to do justice to a country's entire film history pre-2003.



If you think that King Faisal II's hair looks bad, you should have seen him when he was wearing his Admiral's hat. This was an instance where I did quite a bit of computer fixing, but really ultimately to the detriment of the image. For example the gunbarrel effect in panel 4 just looks bad: an airbrush effect that doesn't work with my thick black lines. Sometimes keeping the image with some blemishes intact can work in your favour.