District 9

I watched this film the other day and was blown away by the story and the visual effects. The mech suit worn by Wikus which features during the last moments of the film is designed by Greg Broadmore a superb, talented concept artist. I found the film so influential I've produce a graphic novel style piece - I've added a cooker, which at one point in the film makes a comically devastating weapon (as does a rather large pig!).

More poses.

More poses! this brings the total of Will Solvit covers I've done to sixteen. We decided to go with lots of energetic poses (my guideline was that they couldn't look too 'manga' but still had to be dynamic). After doing a fair number of these I proposed that props are added which tie the cover art to the story.

More Covers

Last week was busy but I did manage to get the cover art for the project pretty much all sorted. The deadline wasn't 'till today but I was buzzing after drinking several cups of coffee so got all of them finished before this.

These all have removable elements on separate layers, like the sword belt etc, mainly so the art can be used multiple times.

Comic strips.

Just as I thought the run up to Christmas was getting quiet I get a last minute brief through for some comic work.. keeps me out of mischief!

I had just under a week to create 3 spreads and a single page but had no script, just four highlighted blocks of text taken from a book so the first job was splitting the text into frames.

Here's the first job, roughing out:

I broke it all down into specific key frames, in this case there wasn't a huge amount of action in the scenes I was given.

And final art:

After feedback I had about 1 day per spread. I would like to have added more detail, if time permitted but sometimes the best thing to do on a tight schedule is get the job finished to a consistent standard rather than miss a deadline.

Painting practice

I've had an opportunity to try out a few different brushes to see if I can get similar effects to how I used to paint traditionally in acrylics with alkyds (makes acrylic workable for longer) and gouache. I remember years ago painting large boards and using sticks to get scratchy lines! In some respects I miss doing a physical piece of art and would love either the money to rent a studio or the space to do large scale painting at home.

So, anyway, here are a couple of paintings and sketches, I'm sure I have others on zip disks knocking about somewhere but I imagine they are more dubious in quality, quite often they are done on one layer and 'scribbled' out in an hour or two with the wacom, generally if I like them I save them.