Anger Cube's Adventures in the Desert

I wanted to try my hand at doing brush inks on a comic page, so I whipped this up. Room for LOTS of improvement, but it's a start!

Brush

I felt I wasn't practicing with my new brush pen as I much as I should have been, so I decided to stop worrying about creating beautiful, perfect images and just go to town with it, just have fun and not worry about mistakes, otherwise I'd never learn. I also did all of these 'straight to pen' in order to force myself to loosen my drawing hand and quickly get what I needed down on paper.

Brush

'lo all.

It's just over a week since my return from the New York Comic Con and I thought it was high time to get my blog going again. 

To kick things off, I did some sketches of the main characters from a three page story (written by Mike Lynch) I'm working on. It's basically a slightly alternative take on the age-old tale of Red Riding Hood. 

 As you can see, these sketches are rather, eh, messy to say the least. Reason being, I got a brush pen through the post today and decided to give it a whirl. It's been quite a while since I last laid hands on a brush pen and, to be honest, I never did much with my previous pen other than quick doodles. After being so used to inking my work with Microns, I must admit that it is pretty difficult to get used to using something that encourages you to draw both quickly and accurately. However, I'll try and stick with it as I have a feeling that brush inking would suit my current style far better than the rigidity that Microns encourage.

ARGH

This page should have been a doddle, it should have been plain sailing but noooooo, my Mac decided it was going to crash the hell out of Photoshop when I least needed it, resulting in me turning the air a particularly cruel shade of blue. I bought this bloody machine so I wouldn't have to deal with shite like this. Ah well, I gain some satisfaction knowing that getting these pages completed on my other laptop would have been nigh-on impossible, not without taking major shortcuts anyways.

After all that, I decided today I'd show you the full page rather than the usual one panel preview. Eh, I'm feeling generous!

Page 3.

No boobs though.

The colours for page 3 of Rodney Tentakle are finito. I must say that I surprised myself with this one, I'm looking forward to seeing how the other pages turn out!

Birdbrained

A bit of a treat for you lot today!

I've just finished up the colours on page 2 of Rodney Tentakle and, instead of showing you a snippet of the page, I'm putting up the entire thing. I've yet to add text and crop it down to size but the finished article shouldn't be drastically different to what you see here.

First off, for comparison, here are the original inks:

And here are the (pretty much) final colours:

The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that the original inks have been edited down quite a bit. The art was a bit too busy in places so I decided to bite the bullet and edit the flack out (not fun) -- if anything, it's taught me to be far more economic with my linework in future.

Anyways, I feel like I'm about to pass out...so I think I'll do just that. G'night all!

t h e C o u n c i l

'lo all.

My updates will be few and far between for the next week or two due to me being stupid enough to go over my download limit on my current service. Bah!

Moving on from that, Rodney Tentakle is nearing completion every day. Currently, I've only one and a half pages left to ink and then I can move on to doing the colouring and lettering. Page 5 has proven to be the busiest page yet with lots of explosions and general chaos going on. While I won't be bringing you the full page juuuust yet, I will show you a sneak peek of one of the panels.

Enjoy!

w h o

I'm on a bit of a Doctor Who kick lately so I decided to do up some quick pics of the 'modern day' Doctors.

I was always aware of Doctor Who growing up but never really had much exposure to it. I always thought it was interesting though, the concept of some guy travelling around time and space in a vehicle that happens to look like a police box was just really out there.

It wasn't until Russel T. Davies resurrected the series in 2005 that I actually sat down to watch Who. Despite a few shonky episodes, I found it to be quite enjoyable. Skip to 5 years later and we now have a brand new series along with a brand new Doctor. I've only seen the first episode so far but all signs point to it being one of the best Whos yet.

Anyways, enough chit-chat and more pictures!

g o n e T r i p p i n

I put together the following for a contest being run by the lovely folks over at Gaijin. If you're at all adept at wielding a pencil or a similar creative device then I suggest you give it a shot.

Anyhoo, here's the piece:

Skip to the end...

Right, this is my final page of inks before I move on to penciling and inking the final three pages. This is page 7 (the penultimate page), would you believe. Why the jump in pages? Well, I tend to work out of sequence at times. Simple as.


Oh, also, if you live in the sunny climes of Oireland then be sure to watch me make an arse of myself on RTE1 tomorrow at 7pm.

TABOCD

Acronyms! Hurrah! What does the title mean? Well, you'll just have to wait until the finished version of Rodney Tentakle to find out now, won't you?

Anyhoo, here's the page 4 inks:

Enter: TENTAKLE!

Here's the inks for page 3. On this page, we get our first introduction in the story to Rodney's father (and my personal fave character in the story), DR. TENTAKLE!!!


I'm really looking forward to inking the next page as it has some panels that were really fun to do in penciled form. The added inks should really make them pop!

RodneyTentakle Page 2 Peek-sees

Apologies for the lack of updates, it certainly wasn't for lack of drawing. I've got quite a few sketches and doodlings to upload but I'm just not in the mood to scan 'em all in right now.

Even more important, seeing as I have all the relevant drawing materials again, my work on Rodney Tentakle is back in full swing again. I've got three more pages to get penciled but before I do that I want to get the rest of the pages inked, just to get them out of the way.

Here's page 2 of the comic. Enjoy!

Update:

Alright then. Fellow Oirish artist, Declan Shalvey made a very good crit with regards to my seeming obsession with using line fills (especially noticeable in the first, third and final panels of the above page). I had a bad feeling at the time when putting them in that it was the wrong thing to do but, going against my better judgment, I stuck 'em in anyways. Dec's crit was just further proof that I should have stuck to my guns.

Still, with the help of technology (and a fair helping of patience) I should be able to sort out the situation fairly easily. For example:

Kind of crude, but with a bit of cleaning up it'll do the trick.

Like father, like son...?

All quiet on the Western front, eh?

Sorry about that. To make up for my lack of drawing-type-goodness in the past week I'm giving you lot the inks I did for a pinup involving two characters from my (along with a certain Mr. Hendrick) current comic project "Rodney Tentakle."

Behold!



The kid in the picture is obviously the rambunctious Rodney, but who is that multi-tentaKled (*ahem*) fellow? Well...look at the comic's title, then look at the image, put two and two together and if you have half a brain, you'll have your answer. Answers on a SAE to the usual address please.

Then again, you could always just look at this blog entry's title and have your answer straight away. Yep.

So, why is he all tentacley? Why does he look like the ever-so-slightly sinister sort? Well, you're just going to have to wait to read the comic now, won't you?

Blackstarrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

I am too tired to function right now. Thanks to my crappy computer, the following colours took far, faaaaaar too long. Bah.

It's life, Jim, but not as we know it

Did up a not so great sketch of the ever-sexist Captain Kirk and before I knew it, I was drawing all of the main 60s Star Trek characters!

Spock, as always, is a pimp.

Shigsy

I decided to do up a pic of the great Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of the Mario, Donkey Kong and Zelda franchises) since it was his birthday recently. Guy's a genius and videogaming just wouldn't be where it is today if it wasn't for his contributions to the field.

Here's to you, Shigsy!

Blackstar 2 sneak peek

Recently, I got the second part of Blackstar lettered up 'as Gaeilge' (ie. in Irish) for the second issue of the excellent Irish comic RíRá. So, I thought this'd be the perfect opportunity to whet your appetite with a sneak peek at a completed (and action-packed) page from Blackstar numero 2. Enjoy!

For those of you that can't read/understand Irish (pretty much the vast majority then) I will upload the pages in English after RíRá issue 2 is released.

Good Grudd

My brother will be graduating from Garda college (for those of you outside of Ireland, a 'Garda' is an Irish policeman/woman) this coming Thursday, so I whipped together a card for him a whiles back. I'm only uploading the images now because I didn't want to spoil my brother's surprise.

I was worried that my brother wouldn't get the joke but he impressed me as always. Right then, on to the images:

First off, here's the complete image -- all inked up, coloured and with added text.

Here are the original lines.

Here's the image printed out and in card form.

My heartfelt message within.

Obligatory Triangapal.

Mega Drive

Yet again was out and about yesterday and have some images to share...

The image on the left was done by Mark Tjan, I did my own version of the characters on the right.
Mark then proceeded to do this wondrous sketch of me. Not a caricature, this is perfectly realistic.Aaaaaaand last but not least, Mark asked me to ink up some pencils he did of a smaurai type fellow. It was quite refreshing inking someone else's work for once.