Friday, March 16, 2007

Oh No, Not More About Daleks...

Dalek sketch: "pencilled" in Adobe Illustrator, printed in 20% cyan onto red card.
Inked with Pitt B Artist Pen and Uniball Eye (Fine). Higlights added with Neocolor crayon.


I'm sometimes asked to do sketches for charity auctions. Sometimes it's easier than others, partly because of deadline pressure, and sometimes because charity events ask for drawings on a theme - anything from the abstract ("romance") to the specific ("your 2000AD characters").
Anyway, Earthlet Eric Moore* lucked out recently, when he asked me to contribute a sketch based on "characters SF and Fantasy in films and TV" - not only was my schedule reasonably free, my Dalek obsession was in full swing.

It's always feels strange doing these things, as it forces me to go back and work on paper (it's also nerve wracking having to do without the "undo" key). I have to confess to "pencilling" the sketch on the computer, then printing it onto red card in an extremely pale blue and inking over the top of it by hand.
Even from the smallest thing there is something to be learned; I had the idea of adding highlights to the drawing using Neocolor crayon, and extremely opaque wax-crayon-cum-oil-pastel that I've been using since Lazarus Churchyard (1991). This drawing contained very fine detail, so it occurred to me to sharpen the ends of the crayons to a fine point, and do you know what? They behaved completely differently. The colour went down in much more opaque strokes. The whole thing was such fun to do that I'm considering doing some original sketches like this to put up for sale at the next Bristol Comics Expo.

*I'd already had dealings with Eric a couple of years before, when he'd oragnized a monster jam sketch featuring the work of many 2000AD artists, each of us drawing out own characters standing at a bar.



Still playing with my toy Daleks!
Landscape is made of celeriac and sprouting potatoes dusted with flour.
Snowflakes and planet in background added in Photoshop.


1 comment:

Andrew Glazebrook said...

Super cool Dalek piccy !!