Been working on Amperduke for a couple of days, fixing and adding bits. There are loads of bits that just didn’t flow right so oversized panels are needed. Check out the difference in the quality of these; the single frame versions are about 2 and a half years ago and then the new stuff I done I done this week.

Some of the older versions are hilariously bad! I might show them to the world years after the book is finished because they’d make look like the hack that I am. Still, it just shows how your sensibilities and skills grow over the years. I think most artists have a 3 month window for their work where everthing outside of that looks shit to them because (you hope) you’re getting better.

I can’t believe my luck. On a Sunday yawn-fest shopping excursion, me and H went to this shitty market and I found this knock-off Lego playset. I instantly knew it had to be from that batch of super real stuff that had been found and incinerated.

Enlighten Brick’s the name and they get top marks for production values, sheer gaul and for making a wierd, unsettling toy. Just look at it!

There’s just too much to take in, the dull military green, the red stars emblazoned on all the uniforms and vehicles, the HUGE electronic surveillance equipment, the toxic barrells, the fighter jets in the background, the strangling device in the commander’s hand and my favourite bit: the guns. The set comes with 2 automatic rifles and 2 handguns.

It’s just crazy. The manufacturers obviously weren’t trying to be creepy ( the hallmark of all good fake toys) so maybe this would sit right in China. Lego with guns. The overall quality of the packaging and individual parts are amazing, and the dope on the stall sold it to me for 8 Euro! He was a Chinese lad about the same age as me and when I went back to buy another one he said ‘No, No, you get good deal on other, This 25 Euro, you got good deal’ I looked at the others and they were 25 quid alright, his boss looking on unimpressed.

I put more pics and scans of it on my new Flickr account and will add more of my wonderful toy collection to it for everyone to see. I have some gems.

And of course, my Lego opus Mr. Amperduke.

UPDATE: Here’s more that I found
k

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Neh, not in the humour of writing so here’s some new bits of Amperduke, part of the added rampage scenes. Resumed work on it for a few hours on Sunday. And yes, ‘Lego Comic’ is a shamesless attempt to try get Lego fans interested in the forthcoming Graphic Novel. Did mention it’s a comic about Lego mini-figures in a Lego themed city?

Suck it.
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Fuck the world in the ear! Jesus christ just hand the reins over to the Polish as soon as possible, I’m sick of Irish people who are bad at their job. Last week I had to go down to The Square to buy provisions, Hayley was returning to get some stuff and intimated that she didn’t want me to be there while she visited so I decided instead of walking in the rain for an hour listening to The Smiths I’d get the shopping in.

35 minute wait at the terminus for a bus that’s meant to leave every 15 minutes. Getting soaked and brooding over my crummy life. Huge big queue at the ATM’s operated by fucking idiot women who treat each step of the transaction like Who Wants To Be A Millionare. You put the card in and take money out you corny old dopes, it’s a simple as that. These people should need a permit to leave the house.

Got the money and entered pulling off my hat. Noticed that the hat smelled really bad. Soaked in pissy rain, sweat and hate juice. I realised that my matted head must now smell too. Blaring UK Subs so I didn’t have to hear piped cover versions of Slade over the intercom thing I marched like I was holding in a liquid poo and got some stuff in Easons and went to Dunnes because I know Tesco’s don’t sell couscous. Oh they sell it in shitty little packs of individual servings alright but I want the good stuff, the uncut grain. Walked around filling the basket, cans and maltana bread but I couldn’t find the couscous.

No joy. Nowhere to be seen. I see couscous as energon cubes, something perfectly bland but open to wild variety. Bang a load of it into some soup and it turns into the gick that Robocop eats. Ready in minutes, cheap and modest, it has sustained me when times were bad and now that I’m unemployed it has become a near daily meal. It’s food’s best kept secret and I began to suspect that the purchasing managers in Dunnes decided to stop selling it because it took up too much space and the margins were bad compared to the other over priced pasta stuff.

Asked a young lad if they had it and I got the universal indifferent “mwha?”. I have no beef with the shelf stackers, they don’t give a fuck and get paid accordingly. I asked if there was a manager around. This faggy dude around the same age as me appears, wearinf a shirt and tie like he matters and he’s gunning for that promotion and I ask him where’s the couscous and that’s when things go wrong.

I can’t remember what he said or how he looked at me but I just got that red flash when you want to immeadiately kill somebody.

In the fraction of a second I got it, loads of stuff ran through my mind. Me kneeling on his chest smashing his smug face in with the heel of my fist and trying to remember to remember the actual colour of fresh blood so I could use it in a comic , me up in court acting as my own council ” Your Honour, I was just dumped by the woman I love a few weeks before Xmas, I’ve been made jobless and I’m homeless and tightly wound, this cunt was not only mocking me but the working classes, to deprive the people of affordable food, this Esperanto of grain, is a disgrace rivalling having to pay your doctor 50 snots to get a perscription renewed. And he had a ‘faux-hawk’”, me in prison appeasing the would-be bum burgulars with countless drawings of Bob Marley and cannabis leafs.

I just wanted to kill him and I was staring into space with the Saving Private Ryan tinnitus in my ear when I realised he was walking off. I paid for what I had and walked home thinking about it. Well I showed him!! Yeah, by writing about it on a blog that nobody reads. Yeah I’m stressed, things are shit and I’m trying to make sense of what has been the worst month in Bobdom since the Care Bears comic merged with The Getalong Gang back in 1986. I know strangling some idiot won’t change anything. But I’m sure it will help a little.

Death metal, violent porn and Bavaria are the only things that can get me through this. I KNOW I’ll be better in a few months, when I’ve moved out, banged a new girl and the timed explosives in the hall go off but untill then it’s Venice 1926.

This time last year I was inking 95% of my stuff the traditional way and then scanning it in to colour and letter it. Never thought I’d get into digital inking so quick if ever and now it’s the other way around, 95% digital. The last pic that I actually inked was this thing.

I still feel sort of ashamed to be doing it all digitally but loads of artists I admire and respect are at it so why not?

Been getting a few questions about how I do it so here is a quick walk through of a page. All this is done in Corel Painter 9.5 with a Wacom tablet. I think it’s a Graphire 3.

This is page 10 from the Freak Show comic. The script was very loose and basically said the two characters walk through the deserted fairground, one of them sees the monster, the man gives chase and gives up. No direct instructions about how it should be broken down which is a godsend, so I got to pace it and plan the layout myself.

So I roughed out the whole 20 pages half arsed and this is page 10:

Top notch art! This was just to see if it reads right. The establishing of scene, a mood shot, character sees something, reacts, character runs, runs, struggles and gives up. I can’t see how it could be done in less panels.

For this page I done loose pencils over a printout of the rough. I didn’t need to do pencils for around 12 of the pages and just drew over the roughs. That’s why most of it looks shit. Ah’m only joshing ya!

I added in a few bits in the pencils like the overturned popcorn stand and tighter backgrounds.

Once the pencils are scanned in you can inkify. I use the scratchboard tool which can be found in the Pens. Always warm up with some doodles to make sure your settings are okay, these are typical of what that involves.

All those strokes are from the same brush without adjusting the pressure sensitivity or other settings. If you want to change them go to Preferences—Brush Tracking and do 5 average strokes and Painter figures out what settings suit your limp wrist best. Keep in mind that the relative scale will change if your doodle pad isn’t near the same size as the pencilled page.

Blammo! Inked in around an hour. I don’t feel so ashamed when I have 5 extra hours to pull my pud.

One of the many features that mimics real life inking in Painter is the way you can rotate the page so easy for those tricky angles. Having the safety net of an undo button allows you to experiment a lot more. I cheat with my speedlines and use pre-made ones. The last panel where he’s knackered, it’s tempting to put in an easy background there because it’s a flat horizontal angle but I went for no background because it suited it better and makes him look alone and lost

Colouring is fun in Painter too, I used to really hate it but sort of look forward to it now. Blazmack! Finished:

For the colours I dropped in that blue on the whole bottom layer and then with the chalk tool layed in the next layer of flats. Slap some highlights in and then blend them with a custom blendy tool and that’s it finished. Here’s the final colour layer without the black for all you perverts:

That’s as simple as it is. Fairly handy and fast to do. So give it a go and if you have any questions and need somebody to ask, try your local priest. Or me.

Yeah that wasn’t really a tutorial in fairness, just me showing off.

I think this is a great idea, Make Comics Forever aims to share advice from young punks like me. They kindly accepted my request to join
and below is my first post:

Being a comic artist with a fairly constant output while still having a crappy day job I believe I can impart some advice to others.

Not everything I say will apply to your technique or production methods but try and stop me:

-Impose a deadline on every project. Reward yourself for hitting them. Great practice for working under pressure real or imagined

-Sundays are the best for drawing comics, get up early, the house will be quiet and you’ll be surprised how much you can get done. But this will involve an early night on Saturday….

-We’ve all heard it a million times: always carry some drawing equipment with you. I swear by this and always have everything with me, a half hour of frenzied drawing on your lunch break makes all the difference, plus, if you see the page that you’ll be working during the day a few times, you’ll know exactly what has to be done when you get home. I found pinning the page in progress to the wall above my pc in work helps, when you’re on the phone or whatever you’ll end up staring at the page from a distance, giving you a fresh perspective and helping you mentally work things out.

-If you have a desk job, or anything that involves paper you can draw individual panels on loose sheets of paper and add them to the page later. This works! With
a page slid under your keyboard you can secretly work away. I was fortunate that
all the panels in my Mr.Amperduke comic are the same size and would fit perfectly inconspicuous under my keyboard. Your boss will think ‘oh that crazy kid is doodling again’ but little do they know.

-Here’s a crazy one that definitely works and can be applied to other stuff, while learning Japanese I laminated a sheet with all the characters I had to learn on it.
I stuck it in the shower, hence the laminating, so every time I showered I was learning. Scoff as you may but ever notice how you start reading ingredients on a shampoo bottle if its right on front of you? Don’t waste that time, laminate character designs or a tricky page.

-If you work on a pc in your day job here’s a tip, say you have Photoshop open and you hear the door, don’t be left fumbling buttons and panicking. Open up Window Explorer and use the Alt+Tab to jump into it if the boss comes in, it opens so fast and looks legit, I’ve weasled out of getting caught on the job dozens of times with this

-You have a light-box, use it. The cheap and easy way is obviously to tape two pages to a window and trace that way but I’ve found a physically lazier way, open Word or whatever and place your pages over the screen. The brilliant white empty document will allow you trace while still at your desk.

-Don’t throw away used or faded pens, a half dead marker gives a great shading effect

-Clean your ruler at regular intervals, wrap it in a piece of paper and tightly drag the ruler up and down. You’ll be amazed at how much crap comes off and its really satisfying seeing what you’ve just prevented from dirtying your page. Sort of like a Clearasil ad.

-Good backgrounds can make a comic. I find looking at photos really helpful for this, not just for copying scenery but for training your eye. Someone gives you a photo of them at a circus, you know it’s a circus because there’s straw visible, in the background a kid has cotton candy, a shadowy figure has an oversized stuffed animal under his arm etc. Picking up on the details that make a scene easily identifiable is important and since a photo conveys an image just like a single panel you can learn a lot from this. How many times have seen old family photos and recoiled at the 70’s wallpaper? Nuff said

-Multitask. Sounds corny but it’s essential. When I’m pressed for time I put a pizza in the oven, have a shower, study while showering, the pizza will be cooked by the time I’m dressed and I eat while I read my emails. Not a second wasted. A practical comic making application of this is while I scanning a page I’m erasing the pencils on the next page while the computer is tied up

-Print concerns: always allow for bleed on your page. Try work out which page will be facing which when it’s printed, sometimes a layout can look crap when beside a certain page either because the same panel layout is used or a character appears in the same pose/composition on the facing page.

-Speech Bubbles: A common mistake among novices is not to leave room for the speech bubbles so precious art is obscured. Stripping in text by copying and pasting from a Word doc to a graphics programme can really help. Sometimes I’ll letter a page to see how it reads before picking up a pencil. The position of speech bubbles guide your eyes down through the page so use this to your advantage, don’t waste time with intricate backgrounds on a text heavy panel, the reader, however courteous is compelled to move at a steady pace.

-If you hate drawing backgrounds, take at look at how manga artists manage to bang out hundreds of pages in a month. Strong establishing shots then vague backgrounds for page after page.

-The old ‘look at it in the mirror’ trick to try get a different take on the picture doesn’t work for me. I prefer to turn the page over the stare intensely at something unrelated for a few seconds, really studying it so that your mind is reset. Flip your page back up and you’ll see it as something new and be able to judge your work objectively

-I asked a friend before who had just finished a 4 year degree in Fine Arts:

“ Tell me the most important thing you learned” his answer was “ If you’re working on something and you can’t get it right, just leave it and start again, don’t try refine something you’re not happy with”. Hey, its good advice and it saved me 4 years.

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Finally actually bought a piece of software. 27 years of age, using computers for more than half my life and never actually bought any legit programmes. I’ve bought tampons more than I’ve bought software. (twice)

I’ve been a Corel nut since I was 15, my Da bought version 3 as he made the move from handmade posters and ads to digital. Poncho led the way in showing me what could be done to my crappy drawings and I was converted. My over-reliance on computers to make comics was at its peak around 2001 and since then I tried reducing the amount of screen time.

Last year I got the Corel Painter 9 demo and was completely dumbfounded by it. The versatility and realness is just mad, Jesus just check out this lad, all done in Painter. I let it slip and I forgot all about it till 2 months ago when I needed a copy of Corel Draw for a loaned laptop for this gay presentation thing in my day job, on the Corel site I saw the Corel 9.5 free trial and grabbed it. You get 60 days to dick around with it which is more than enough time to convince you. For the 60 days I messed around with it and inked around 6 pages , you get used to drawing on screen so quick it’s scary.

What pushed me over the edge was Alex Maleev’s Daredevil comic which he does completely digitally with Painter. For the first time I went about pricing software instead of just stealing it, like when you download a great album and feel guilty about it I reasoned that those Princes in Corel deserve the cash and the money would go back into developing the next version. I reckoned it’d be 500-800 clams and was hopefully going to con my boss into buying it for me. I was shocked to see that you can buy Corel Painter 9.5 for UK£150. It arrived yesterday (just at day 59 of my 60 days trial)

The first thing I noticed about the packaging and enclosed literature was the informalness, maybe contrived but the relaxed tone of the ringbound guide is the furthest thing from the usual cold instruction manuals you get. It’s just great. In conjuction with a Wacom you can do ANYTHING. So go get the free download here

These are all the comics in me and Cian’s ‘Shoot the Red Brisket’ series. He’s off to Australia for a year tomorrow the lucky duck. I love most of these, not wild about the art on some of them. A few of them have appeared in the Shiznit and the Superman one was printed in 2000ad a few issues ago as part of an article. We wanted to give the 3 panel format a go after seeing The Perry Bible Fellowhip. I interviewed Nick Gurewitch and all, decent bloke.

Click em for enlargements.

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Here’s a palm sized pile of steaming hate from the Hate Extravganza.

Yeah it’s seems I’m not alone with the phoney t-shirt thing. I find the wearing of shirts with band names on them something that should be stopped around 16 anyway. Yeah, you like Led Zeppelin and are wearing a shirt with Led Zeppelin on it, well done and thanks for letting us know. What is it? Hoping that a female Zeppelin fan will see it and want to suck your dick because you’re her type? But wearing a shirt as part of some look as mentioned above has got to be a million times worse. You cunts.

The cover version thing…….I hate it. Does it make sense?

The books thing, I think everyone can relate to that one because I think we’ve all been guilty of it to a point. Sometimes you just love a book and can’t shut up about it. But please shut up. The DaVinci Code, The General and The Joy are prime examples of this.

Here is the much requested (after a mention on yoof radio Spin FM and appearing on the kid’s Bebo) Bad Dublin Hash from issue 3 of the Shizeroo

What a great comic.
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