More Dredd Colours

A before-and-after look at a panel of the Judge Dredd samples I'm working on.

Mega City One by night

How romantic... they should really be holding hands with a view like that...

Working on a few new Dredd sample pages this week, in preparation for the Bristol con in early May. I've taken the plunge and gone for full colour this time.

My big news is that I'm going to be doing a few pages for Starship Troopers comic (Markosia) - my first "real" published comics work! This is thanks to Editor/Writer Tony Lee; you can read more about it in the last paragraph of his latest column over at Comics Bulletin here:
http://www.comicsbulletin.com/hoaw/120579061026864.htm

Bloody hell, I better do a good job now, hadn't I! The Dredd stuff is a nice warm-up for the Troopers gig, as I'll be doing full colour pages for that as well - just waiting for the script...

Website Updated

I've updated my main site at last - I've changed the design to a much simpler, faster-loading no-nonsense look. No more rollovers and i-frames thank you very much... from now on it's clean and simple all the way (God I hate web design - I used to love it, now I want it as simplistic and unlikely to go tits-up as possible): http://www.jimmibo.co.uk/

The Creative Process (well, how I do it anyway)

Here is a little look at the various stages a page goes through - at least the stages it goes through when I draw it! This is another page from Imposter.

Pencils: The space on the lower left is for the titles and credits. Tony pointed out that I hadn't left much room for the dialogue in panel 2, so I enlarged that panel before inking...

Inks: I'm very into my brushes and dip-pens these days, they're really starting to work well for me. I used to use various technical drawing pens from 0.1 to 0.8 - and I still do for some bits and pieces, but it's 90% brushes and dip-pens now. The line is so much more varied and "alive." You can see below, how Photoshop saved my arse once again - I drew more space for the panel 2 dialogue, then photoshopped it to overlap the main panel.

Colours: Photoshop once again for the colours. Here's a shot as I started work - I wish I'd taken more as I went along, I'll try to do that with the next thing I colour. I always do the backgrounds first obviously, and the foreground figures are the last thing to work on.

... and here is the final coloured page!

Imposter

Here's a look at a couple of pages from Imposter - which is a pitch I've been working on with writer Tony Lee (Starship Troopers, Doctor Who, etc). I'm not sure if we'll be doing much more of this, but it can't hurt to show a couple of pages off!