The Crab Apple Caper

Comic Cast Exhibition

This cartoon was done for an upcoming exhibition organised by Craig and Liam who present Irelands foremost comics podcast, The Comic Cast.

The theme of the exhibition is "Just what I always wanted" so Gar Shanley drafted up this idea to fit the bill. The exhibition is being held in the Twisted Pepper with the artwork being auctioned off on ebay. All proceeds from the sales are going to the Crumlin and Temple St. childrens hospitals (my mum used to be a nurse in Temple St back in the late fifties so she's well chuffed about all this!).

For more information on the event go HERE.

Colour it in...

Another page for a colouring book I'm working on.

ALSO, our new Hat animation has gone LIVE!... LIVE, I SAID!

The Hat Will Return

Anyway, we're making a short flash animation based on The Hat from the Windell comic. Richard O'Shea (Ireland's foremost Grizzly - also the heaviest baby in the history of the state) is bringing my drawings to life while Garret Shanley (who also wrote the windell comic) is on script duty. It's going really well and should be finished soon, available for all to view on youtube. The guy in the pic above is one of the guest stars.

Noted

Look at this beauty. Got it yesterday, along with a bunch of equally splendiforous comics from blackshapes creator, gentleman, scholar, Phil Barrett. Thanks a million, Phil. Your work is always pure quality.

Samples From a W.I.P.

A W.I.P. of course is a Work In Progress, and that's very much what this is. I'm still writing this stuff as I'm drawing it, which is a bit bonkers, but I just can't bring myself to sit down and contrive the material into a soup-to-nuts document.

Why?

Because the drawing informs the writing as much as the writing informs the drawing. Sufficed to say, this is not a process I'd necessarily recommend to anyone, or even one I'll be using again in the future. The only reason I'm doing it on this ditty is beacsue it's an abstract narrative, and if I just attempt to plot it out, the left side of my brain will lock the door on the right side. Can't be having that.

If I was doing a straight narrative I'd almost certainly outline and write it before illustrating it. But you really don't have to be able to see the forest for trees when you're creating abstract narratives 'cos by defintion they're more holistic. As long as the individual units sustain themselves the whole should look after itself. Any joins you're making are going to be more indirect, symbolic, unconscious, or even thematically driven, rather than functioning as a set of linear progressions on the surface.

It's not to say I don't love straight narrative. I love plots. LURVE them. But I love abstract shit too. Horses for courses, and all that.

Salvo's Colouring Book

Here are some prototypical lines for a possible colouring book project. If I can muster another fifteen or twenty like this in the future I might self-publish it as Salvo's Colouring and Activity Book.

Silkscreen Print

I recently received this beautiful print in the mail from Ztoical. In a feat of clairvoyance that would make Derren Brown flinch, the colour of the walls in this print are almost identical to the colour of the walls in the room where I work.

Kingdom of Furniture

Salvo's Test Card

Nothing signals the counter-cultural intentions of an artist quite like the fusion of dismembered heads and test card chic. That’s right… one look at this baby and the beholder is left with little choice but to conclude that its creator is one of those serious artistic types who would never let THE MAN’S member get within an asses roar of his bum hole.

Who knows, the viewer might even be inclined to picture the draughtsman responsible for this illustration as a hopelessly maladjusted (and probably overweight) fellow who has taken up permanent residence beneath the monstrous shadow cast by the establishment, clutching a shovel in his fist.

On a more practical level (and putting aside any and all considerations of creative matters) the periodical transmission of this test card on giant screens all over the world would allow any viewer the opportunity to conserve vital energy by just staring at it for anything up to an hour; energy that is badly needed for the important business of being awake in the world.

K. V. Jr.

"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country."

Let the Fish and Goose soiret commence

Our homepage for Windell comics has been overhauled (thanks to Richard) so you can now buy the comic from the site. Also, the promo has been posted on youtube so you can go set your glazzies on that HERE or alternatively click below. Tell your friends.

Abandoned marine comic

Nothing new to post as I'm using every spare minute I have on a new project. So... I'm posting some panels from a thing I was fiddling with just before I started the Windell comic. I didn't get much further than what you see here and it's very doubtful I'll ever pick it up again so I might as well just dump some of it here.

I'll try and post something original and done purely for this site asap, anon, post-haste etcetera... Please understand that my hands are tied until the new report by Dolmen Stockbrokers is published. Forthwith.

Yo-Yo's

Pomona, CA

Heineken! F$*# that shit. PABST! BLUE RIBBON!

I just spent a week re-doing the same panel more times than I'd care to admit. sheesh.

His early stuff's the best.

You know it.

Stipple Head

My first attempt at stipple rendering (this is a technique where you add form by tapping lots of dots in with a fine nib) and it's not great, but even with a small sketch like this I felt like I had to put in as many dots as there are stars in the milky way. A bit of a pain in the arse. Instead of dots you could also render the lighter and darker areas with lots of small lines. To view a more subtle and dextrous demonstration of this technique go HERE

L & H

Salvo is already 7 or 8 pages into a new comic. I might post some samples soon. I might not. At least one part of the story will be located in a place like THIS.

Random scene

La Strada

These are some of the main characters from a 1954 Italian movie called La Strada. I copied them out of the free booklet that came with the dvd. At first, I was just going to do a simple sketch of Zampano doing his rubbish circus act but I ended up making it more of a poster type thing with the other characters too.

Cheers

Just a quick post to say THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU to everyone who turned up for our launch on Friday night. It was a genuine pleasure to both catch up with some folks I hadn't seen in a while and to also meet some other folks for the first time. I hope it won't be too long before we can all meet up again... probably whenever and wherever the next strategic investment conference is being held.

LOVE

Washed-up Cagney Inked

Jimmy Cagney

Two portraits of the greatest screen actor of all time. I might ink the top one in the next few days and post the results.

Oh yeah, to anyone reading this in Dublin: there are now some copies of Windell Classics Compedium available to buy at Liam Websters comic shop at the corner of Crow St. in Temple Bar. It'll be available at other emporia beyond the official launch date.

Nosebleedman

Here's just one of the many oddballs and lowlife's who might be featuring in a new thing i'm working on. He has been provisionally titled nosebleedman. Here we see him buying some new furniture.

Everyone has Mindpuss...

Drink 'em in. There's nothing better than receiving original art in the mail from other scribblers. Today I got these two beautiful pieces from mindpuss creator Ronan Kennedy.

I'm starting to build up a small but growing collection of original work. OK, it's VERY small, but still, these will get framed and hung next to my note from Phil Barrett and my original panel from Mr. Amperduke by Bob Byrne which contains the mighty Panzer Meister.

Hey, if anyone else visiting this blog wants to post me something feel free to email me and we can swap some doodle-do's. And let me publicly thank Ronan for sending me these two beauties. I love them. No, I lurve them. No, no, I LUFF them...

"I wanted to rub humanity's face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror."

cock-a-doodly-do-be-doo-wap-wap-wap

It's perpetually pissing rain in the midlands today. Maybe I'll start doing weather forecasts alongside the doodle posts. It's pissing rain. Perpetually.

I bought La Strada for 6 euros yesterday. I've never seen it before but I'm sure it's worth 6 euros.

The Windell Showcase is at the printers and should be finished before the end of this week. There'll be a cabaret to launch the book with Noel V. Ginnity as compere. He's already promised me he'll do his WEE-WAW routine so it's gonna be a fucking great night. More details soon.

The Future is Unwritten

The Old Crew

I know the new Abrams movie is just around the corner but today I decided to draw some of the old guys instead. The new movie certainly won't stink but it remains to be seen just how good it's going to be.

I'm more of a casual Star Trek fan than one of the true believers, but given the times that are in it, I think everyone going to the cinema this May could do with a good dose of entertainment and a bit of optimism.

EXP #0

This is a new page for something that might happen later in the year. I think it's about the fourth page in a six page sequence. It's at a very experimental stage. Lots of floating ideas without any structure. When I'm starting something like this I try not to pressurise myself into making too much literal sense of the drawings 'cos it'll just end up getting nailed down to some bullshit explanation without other possibilities being explored first. I like this page so it''ll definitely end up in the comic, whatever other decisions I make from here on in.

It's enjoyable because you're basically free to mess around with as many unrelated doodles as you want. I've mapped out about six opening pages where the sequences were created almost entirely on instinct. I might have stopped once or twice to ask myself what the fuck I'm doing and then alter my decision about what I'm drawing but most of the inital material is drawn intuitively. For better or for worse.

The Black Rider

Today I finished all the nib work for the windell book so to celebrate I naturally decided to do this drawing of The Black Rider. This ended up looking way more cartoony than I wanted. I just slapped it down without stopping to think what I was doing and this is what I got. I think I hate it.

Windell will be printed next month and available to buy around late April or early May. More info as soon as I know.

Promo Portraits

Here are three standalone portraits of windell characters created for possible use in an animated promo that's being created by Richard O'Shea. Go here: www.osheamedia.com

M

This sketch was done with black and white acrylic. It's one of my favourite movie images ever. I first saw it in an old movie magazine when I was about 8 or 9 and I just remember wanting to see the movie very badly 'cos I thought Peter Lorre looked so scary.

I only got to see 'M' properly in the last few years. I was expecting it to be an expressionistic horror thing with canted angles and Lorre leering down at the cherubs. Instead it's a very sober movie based on a real life case in Germany just before the film was shot. A lot of it's taken up with the unglamorous details of police work in tracking down a child killer. It's brilliant stuff, just not the ghoulish spectacle I was expecting it to be.

2 New drawings

I've been awake for about... oh, twenty odd hours straight. I did these two sketches in the wee hours this morning. I don't know what the hell is going on in the first one. The second one was sketched straight from a photo of Christopher Lee in a book I bought years ago called "Who's Who of Horror."

Last night I finished the centre pages for the Windell showcase. It's a Ms. Ice Skates story (not that that means anything to anyone yet) and its in colour. Only three pages to go and its finished.

Funny Fugue

Nothing new to post so I dragged this out from an old pile of abandoned stuff.

This comic was going to be a metaphyscial response to the Barbara Streisand vehicle "Funny Face".

Finished cover

This was finished by putting acrylics down over the pencils and then inking the outlines and other details over the paint. This is actually a scan of a laser copy of the original and the colours have come out identical to the original so there's zero need for any correction.

Oh yeah, and just for future retrospective reference, today was the day when the citizens of our fair isle (Eire) learned the full extent of our banking sectors GUBU status. It's history in the making folks.

Pencils for Windell showcase cover

2 more panels from Salvo's desk...

This panel again sums up the way I want to keep doing things (for now at any rate). The lines have to be clear and absolutely consistent so I use nibs (edding 1880, no. 1 and no.3) to build these lines up very tightly around the pencil lines. Obviously it takes a bit longer than making a single brush stroke but I'm fairly certain the results are distinctive enough to merit the process. It just means you can steer the line directions with an extra level of precision and steadiness. I like uniform grey tones created either by parallel or cross-hatched lines. I also like creating these busy ground textures like you get in the desert landscapes or on the patio tiles in the above panel.

Pencilling out the composition is the most enjoyable part of this way of working because it's the only real creative part. The inking process is always a fairly dull and protracted process of just executing on what's already been decided.

I'd like to think maybe this time next year I'll have completely switched styles again, but chances are I'll be sticking with this approach for a while.

Who's this guy?