Everyday Comics #1 (Special Features)

As promised, here is some behind the scenes stuff for last Monday's cartoon:

1) Once I had the idea or sorted I knew I wanted to base the image off and actual comic book cover, like what I did for the Wanking Dead comic. Except this time, I thought I'd try and copy the cover as much as possible and just add some details in there. Now it did take me some time to actually find a decent cover surprisingly, pretty quickly after I started I knew it had to me a Superman cover, as it just seemed to fit. Especially as a lot of earlier Superman covers seemed to be him just lifting and busting out of stuff. So after spending some time with my old friend Google Image search, I found this beauty:

Which was just perfect, especially the way he has his arms and hands positioned and I also knew I could pull this one off as the background was really simple!

2) Once I had my image, I did a quick sketch to get the layout and text all sorted:

So you can see where I've played around with the "Everyday Comics" logo, and made a note that I'd have to do the "Shoppingbag" by hand, why? Well I honestly couldn't find a free font that was even close, which is odd.

3) Next I sat down in front of my PC with the original Superman cover on the screen and spent quite a while coming up with this pencil drawing:

4) Because I copied this as close as I could to the original I was worried that when I added the extra stuff in, like the shopping bags and logo, if I stuffed them up then I may ruin the whole thing. So to fix this problem, I grabbed some tracing paper, stuck it over the top and just added in all the extra stuff, which looks like this:

All I had to do after this if lay both the sheets on top of each other on my light box (It's a big box with two fluoro bulbs in it and a glass top so I can trace pencil drawings onto my good inkjet paper) and just trace both at the same time onto inkjet paper.

5) Once it was traced I then went and inked the image using various ink pens (Sharpie Fine Point, Bic Mark It Ultra Fine Point, Staedtler Triplus Fineliner and a Copic Multi Liner 0.1 to be exact) to come up with this:

6) Now is where the fun begins and the magic happens; I scanned this image into Photoshop and cleaned it up (I messed around with his face as well as I wasn't happy with it, in fact I'm still not) and coloured it and made the background transparent. I then imported the image into Illustrator where I used quite a few layers for each object. So all the text was separate, as was the background gradient and all those damn lines. Man those lines took some time and patience I tell you. So finally we get this:

I hope you all liked it, I had a lot of fun doing this one, hence why I'm now planing some more "Everyday Comics" cover soon!

Mike

  

The Wanking Dead - Special Features

Hello again, just thought I'd share some with you all how I created this week's cartoon "The Wanking Dead"

Once I got the idea, I did a quick Google search to find an actual Walking Dead comic cover to base the cartoon on and eventually I found issue number 30:

I'd loved to have it pretty much identical to this cover, but I'm not that good so I kind of just used it as a rough basis on the design and still did it in my style.

Here's the first initial sketch I did:

Initially the guy with all the porn looked kind of like me for some reason, I was going with the cliché fat nerd in the sketch. Once that was done I went ahead with the first pencil drawing:

So you can see at this stage I just changed the guy to be less of a cliché and more of a normal guy, which I'm not sure if this works better or not, it just felt like a better decision to me. The X marks were originally going to be the pure black spots, but in the end I ditched that and went for more subtle shades of grey in the background. And finally we have the final inked version:

So there you go, hope you found it interesting.

Mike

Friday Night Art 10

Just a quickie tonight, just thought I'd share the full body image I just finished tonight of my logo 'bert for the upcoming website relaunch:

What do you think? I've gone back to his more 'meaner' looking roots. And here's the pencil sketch of it:

See you next time!

Mike

Friday Night Art 9

I had an idea the other day, I always wanted to use my Friday nights to experiment with different art styles and the other day at work (don't tell anyone) I did this quick (seriously it was, what do you think I stand around all day scribbling?) drawing of good old Mario. If you didn't already know, I'm a big gamer and a huge Nintendo fan-boy, so Mario is kind of my hero and seen as though I work in a games department his lovely face is all over the place. So I had the idea to use this Friday to experiment with drawing Mario in different styles and such, in fact I like the idea so much I think I might experiment with some other of my favourite characters over the next few Fridays. I didn't have all that much time tonight, so here's a bunch of quick Mario sketches I whipped up, I'll do some more next week:

So what do you think? I really like the last one here and I think I might do something with it in the future.....

Later!

Mike

Friday Night Art 8

Hooray! It's back! After weeks of saying I was going to do it, I've finally gotten around to doing some Friday Night Art! I had an idea the other day, as every time I've done these Friday night art posts I always post them way to late in the night as I'm usually drawing them that night. Not so now, tonight I thought I'd post up some of my old favourite sketches first and then do some drawing so I can then, next week post tonight's drawings and then do some new ones! Damn I'm clever....


Both these two sketches ending up being used in one way or another for friends of mine, this first one:

Was for a mate of mine who was having a zombie pizza night at his house, which ended up being a really awesome idea and it was good fun I must say. Anyway, he asked me to draw something up for the invites to his "ZombiePizzaLooza" so I came up with this.

Now this next one is one of my favourites:

This sketch I drew years and years ago on a train ride home from work. I have no idea what the inspiration was, I just started drawing, I still love this character design. A good buddy of mine had this band way back when and he asked me to design a t-shirt for the band and I ended up using this character for that, hence why I later added the "Run Amok" logo on the t-shirt as that was the band name. I'm thinking I might do some more sketches of this guy again soon and I think I'll keep the t-shirt, even though the band isn't around any more as I like the idea and it can be a homage to those guys.

Anyway, hope you like my sketches! See you again on Monday!

Mike

Friday Night Art 5

I'm back again for some more Friday Night Art, I am pretty tired and thought of bailing tonight. But I did that last week so I went 'screw it' and whipped out the old pencils and scribbled away and as usual had fun. Why oh why do I procrastinate doing things I enjoy? Anyway so first up I stuck to my current favourite theme of clowns:

Not my usual happy, quirky characters is it? That would be because I was in a pretty foul mood before I drew this. I'd had a really shit afternoon today as my 2 year old son was better a right little shit. This is just a pencil sketch, I darkened it a tad in Photoshop before saving it. So I at least got to vent a bit with this one and I actually felt better after so I then went on to draw this:

Which is another in my "Black and Red" series and also what I tend to call my "Brinkemon" characters that I sometimes draw. Can you see a running theme that I've been enjoying of late? Yep, stripy pants and shirt designs....not sure why I just like stripes at the moment. This was done with plain old red and black felt tip pens. So as with all these Friday Night Art pieces, they are all pretty rough and quick, I was just thinking that I might actually redo/do better versions of some that I love eventually as either paintings or in digital form, please let me know if you want me to and which one's you think I should do.

Anyway bed is calling, see you again on Monday!

Mike

Friday Art

As you may remember I mentioned the other week about my new years resolutions, well I have some others, I've actually created a sort of rough timetable for how I spend my spare time, so I can try and get more stuff done (My issue is that I enjoy way to many things and it's difficult to do all of them, like games, books, comics, art etc.). I have to say its been working out really well, which brings me to Friday nights, which is art night! It's been so long since I've just sat down and drawn stuff just for the sake of it, not for a cartoon or anything and man it felt really good!


So I worked on two pieces tonight, the first here is an unfinished sketch that I'll do some more work on next week I think. This started as a random sketch I doodled in my son's diary, we sometime draw together....well I draw stuff and he then scribbles all over it. So I thought I'd do a bigger, better version, so here's the sketch:

So it's still a work in progress, I'll see what happens to it next week.

Next, I just grabbed a handful of random black and red Artline felt-tip pens and just drew whatever came to mind and here's what happened:

So as it was so random and unplanned, there's a lot that needs fixing, but it was very liberating to just randomly start drawing with ink pen and not sketch in pencil first. I intend to explore this technique more next week as well. 

Oh sorry about the photo's, I would have scanned them but the drawing pad I used was too big for my little old A4 scanner. So what do you think? I had fun, that's what's important. What I do with these who knows, maybe I might do final painted versions, maybe not, we'll see.

Mike