The trouble with getting to draw a character that you've loved since childhood (at least, one as susceptible to interpretation as Judge Dredd) is working out how you're going to draw him. When Alan Barnes offered me my first Dredd strip back in October 2003, that was what leapt to mind. I've never been one for sketching other people's characters in my own time, so though I had a clear idea of what I didn't like in a Judge Dredd, that didn't really add up to having a clear idea of what my Dredd would look like. I've done 40-odd pages of Dredd in the past three years, and sort of groped my way towards a version I can live with, but it wasn't till someone asked me for a Dredd sketch at Bristol, and my hand slipped as I was roughing out the shape of the head in pencil, that I suddenly saw what I really wanted my Dredd to look like. I made sure to do a quick rough drawing to make sure I wouldn't forget the proportions (above), then set Old Stony Face aside to bash out more Great Game.
Then just the other day, Tharg-in-residence Matt Smith obligingly asked me to do a Dredd cover for 2000AD (don't have a Prog number, but it's needed by the end of June). So pretty soon I'll get to do my "proper" version for real...
Bliss.
1 comment:
I'm afraid the sketch I mentioned was done at this year's Bristol... but thanks for sharing this, it's good to see where my old sketches end up. I'd forgotten putting in the reference to my heavy-duty convention-sketch marker-pen habit :-)
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