Christmas

Hope you all had a great Christmas. Here's the card I did for my wife. It was a bit of a rush, but has been too well received by its audience for me to criticise it!

Hellboy..... and a dog.

I'm going to assume Mike Mignola won't be dropping by to be less than amused by my messing with his much loved (especially by me) character's often used catch-phrase. The dog attempting a poo is my own dog, Boo.

Octonauts, with added Olivia

Here's what I've drawn for my daughter for Christmas. She, no, WE, are all huge Octonauts fans in our house, the books and the cartoons, so hopefully this will go down well.

Superman process

For anyone interested. I've added an extra stage to my drawing process. Here's how it all goes -
Various sketches. Final pencils, and then inks.....Here's where I've changed my process. I used to ink (on watercolour paper) then scan and add colour and tones on the computer. I convert the linework layer to multiply and colour underneath, adding tones on a separate layer. As I try to maintain a fairly organic look I decided to do more of the tonal work by hand with coloured ink. I think it worked out quite well, even though I still did additional toning on the computer. Hopefully as I practice I'll get better at the hand toning and maybe try more washes to eliminate as much computer toning as possible, making for a more streamlined process for me, something which I've been working towards. The other handy thing about hand tones is I plan to do some masking (solid colour shapes without outlines) and that should make it easier.
And here's that final piece again, if you compare the two, you might notice I wasn't happy with the head, and shrank it down slightly - I try not to do too much altering on the computer, but sometimes you just have to! I might do a few more superhero pics, as I've had an idea for another.

Superman

Maybe it's because of Superman The Movie, maybe it's because I love straight up heroes, but there'll always be a place in my heart for Superman. Here's a pic I did, heavy on the Golden Age.

Hilda

There's a new Hilda book out by Luke Pearson from Nobrow. The first Hilda story was wonderful, and Pearson gets better all the time, so the latest will be amazing - I'll confirm this if my Christmas wish list becomes a reality! In the meantime, a few folk on twitter drew their version of Hilda, so I joined in the fun.