Drawing hands and faces

A handful of drawing tutorials:

Tips for drawing: hands 101 from Animator Island.
Hand tutorial/tips2 by Quinni at Deviantart.
Notes on expressions from Lackadaisy.

Another Kickstarter

Here's another Kickstarter project for your delectation:

 

I played Dungeons and Dragons in the 80's and have just started picking up the Pathfinder game from Paizo Publishing. I also played Everquest and World of Warcraft so I'm interested to see what a company with a background in tabletop gaming can bring to the MMO world.

More Comics Stuff

Following on from the last post, a quick link to Mick McMahon's process for his Tank Girl pages.

And I've been digitally remastering the pages of my 1990's comic Section 6, tidying up the wonky frames and re-lettering.



And creating all new, all digital pages from the thumbnails that were never turned into pages.

Comics stuff

I've been a fan of comics for as long as I can remember. I started off as a kid with Buster, moved on to Battle and then 2000AD. Moving to London aged 17 I fell in with a bad crowd and got onto the hard stuff - Watchmen and V for Vendetta. I've never really been a fan of the Superhero comic, most of the comics I read ended up in the DC Vertigo line, so I suppose they would be classed as horror. For some reason I always preferred DC and didn't really get into any Marvel lines and I seemed to gravitate towards English writers, although that maybe because there was such an explosion of talent in the mid-80s and early 90s.

In the late 80's I started collecting original comic artwork, thanks mostly to the now defunct Comic Showcase store on Neal Street. I think my first purchase was a blue line from V for Vendetta.



In the mid 90's a wrote and drew my own tongue in cheek, derivative comic. 8 whole pages of Section 6, a superhero team of inept squatters. It was actually published in a small press anthology, but all 8 pages were shrunk to 1 side of A5 which didn't really do it justice (or maybe it did). I'm planning to put together an "Absolute" edition of the comic for my friends who were featured in it.



Anyway, to the point of this post. I follow quite a few comic artists on Twitter and in the last 2 days I saw a couple of links I felt I needed to share. David Peterson, author and artist of the fantastic Mouseguard comics (@mouseguard on Twitter) posted on his blog about his process. It's a fascinating and educational look at one artist's methods.

Neill Cameron, author and artist for Mo-Bot High (@neillcameron on Twitter) posted a link to a Disney "Comic Strip Artist's Kit". The Disney kit has been around for over 35 years but is just as relevant today.

As to my process, looking back at the sketches from about 15 years ago it appears to be: Make a doodle during a particularly boring meeting at work; base whole comic around single doodle. I did actually do thumbnails of each page, although they sometimes differed radically from the finished page. I definitely didn't plan how much text was going to go in each panel. In fact, in order to fit the text in and make it readable, after drawing the comics on A4 paper I photocopied them and blew them up to A3, re-inked them and then created text panels and speech bubbles on another sheet of paper, cut them out and glued them onto the A3 pages.



If you're interested in creating comics I recommend Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud and How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way by Stan Lee and John Buscema. There are lots of other good books out there too.

If you have children and you want to get them into comics and reading, check out The Phoenix Comic, a great new comic for kids with some of the top UK writers and artists working on it, which includes Neill Cameron's How to Make Awesome Comics.

For a taster of comic talent in the UK now you should read Nelson edited by Rob Davis and Woodrow Phoenix, a completely brilliant anthology. 54 British comic artists come together to write the story of Nel, from 1968 to the present day with each artist tackling 1 day in the life of Nel for each year of her life.

In other comics news, DC have announced a slew of Watchmen prequels. Hrrm.

The Firelight Isle

Paul Duffield, artist extraordinaire of online comic FreakAngels, is starting a project for a new online comic The Firelight Isle. The project is looking for funding on Indiegogo:

A Couple More Kickstarters

Here are a couple more Kickstarters I'm following or backing:

Effigy Miniatures is Tom Mason's Kickstarter to fund his project to go it alone producing his own miniature lines. I'm backing this as the sculpts for his Sci-Fi line look fantastic.



Warparty is Mark H. Walker's fantasy battle game that combines Axis & Allies style play with Dungeons and Dragons. There's a bit of roleplay and a lot of strategy. It looks like it should be a fun game from the demo video.

Also, my Coffee Joulies from a previous Kickstarter arrived this week. I tested them at home, but I keep forgetting to bring one in for work.

Domesday Reloaded

The BBC has today relaunched their 1980's Domesday project on the web as Domeday Reloaded. The project started in 1986 and over a million members of the public contributed to it, collecting data about their local area that they thought would be interesting in 1,000 years time. The data was then packed onto 2 special laser disks that could only be read by a BBC Master computer running special software. Due to quick obsolescence of the hardware, the data soon became almost impossible to access.

Recently a team has taken the disks and painstakingly taken the analog data from them to recreate it all on a website.

The project split the country into 23,000 squares, or D-Blocks and each was assigned to a volunteer to record. I remember going on walks with my Dad in 1986 to take pictures of our assigned D-Blocks.