Lowlife: Hostile Takeover - The Dog Ate My Homework

Apologies for the lack of bloggery-pokery the last few weeks - I've been so hammered by deadlines on the last episode of Lowlife: Hostile Takeover (and a subsequent job, about which more soon) that I haven't had time or energy to post. I have some half-finished posts about the last episodes of Lowlife which I will make the effort to finish, as they're mostly about my switchover to working in Manga Studio anyway.

In the meantime, here are some of my character sketches and concept designs for Lowlife: Hostile Takeover.

All characters and designs from Lowlife: Hostile Takeover by Rob Williams & Me
Lowlife © 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife Created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

Lowlife: Hostile Takeover Part 6: A Rod for my Own Back

Judge Sniper design for Judge Dredd: Master Moves
(Megazine 216, April 2004, design produced November 2003)
Judge Dredd © 2010 Rebellion Developments/ 2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra

One thing I always admired about certain Dredd artists was the consistency of their world-building; Ron Smith, for example, was pretty good at working out fixed designs for things like H-Wagons and then sticking to them. 

So when I saw a sniper team mentioned in the script for Lowlife: Creation part 6, I thought it would be great excuse to dig out the Judge-Sniper design I came up with for my first ever Dredd story (Judge Dredd: Master Moves, Megazine 217, April 2004). Unfortunately for me, I did that design in a fever of enthusiasm at getting to work on Dredd, as an answer to something that had always bothered me as a reader of 2000AD: if Judge Dredd's uniform is covered in eagles, and his bike has a dirty great eagle on it, why then do all the ancilliary Judges (teks, med-teks, forensic guys etc) always have plainer uniforms without eagles on them?

Judge Sniper from page 9 of Judge Dredd: Master Moves
(Megazine 216, April 2004)
Judge Dredd © 2010 Rebellion Developments/ 2000AD
Judge Dredd created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra

Blindingly Obvious Answer: drawing the eagles is a pain in the arse. Any sane artist will never draw more eagles than he has to.

And that's fine except... when it came to it, I really did want to do something special for my first Dredd, so I ended up with a design the had eagles on both shoulders (I also did a Sector House Chief with double eagles in the same episode). And given that I only had to draw the sniper a couple of times, that was fine.

So six years later, I dig the old design out, and somehow I can't make myself let go of the whole double-eagle thing, even though this time round I've got crowds of the buggers to draw. I must be mad.

Massed Judge Snipers from Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part 6 
Lowlife © 2010 Rebellion Developments/ 2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint

Lowlife: Hostile Takeover Part 3

Roughs for Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part three page one.
Original version (left) and revision (right).
Lowlife © 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

Slightly belated post for Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part three. This episode fought me a bit regarding the Dirty Frank execution tableau in panel six - my first try (left) seemed to me insufficiently dramatic and also possibly a bit unclear. I decided to go instead for a slightly more diagrammatic angle, with a clear view of the sword descending towards Frank's outstretched neck, and everyone is slightly more dynamic poses. To help the storytelling flow I also flopped panels 3-5 left-for-right. This is just the kind of correction you can make by hand with tracing paper and a light box, but by gor it's quicker and easier on computer.

Pencils  for Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part three page one, with revisions.Lowlife © 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

Here are the pencils for page one - as you can see, I got to the pencilling stage before deciding to change panel six. These pages were done in Adobe Illustrator, which allows you to work on the area surrounding the page - so I could shift the roughs and pencils for panel six out onto the surround for safety in case the new panel design didn't work out (3). The same is true of the first try at drawing the right-hand Samurai in panel one (1). And because Illustrator has no Page Rotate Tool, it was easier to draw Aimeé's head the right way up off-page and then copy and rotate it in place in panel one (2).

Roughs for Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part three page two.
Original version (left) and revision (right).
Lowlife © 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint.

Roughs for page two: Aimée's knock-kneed pose in panel two risked looking silly, and Frank was obscured by the foreground Samurai. The revision (above right) tidies the composition up, with all the characters in more dynamic poses to boot. The change of angle between Aimée and the Samurai meant I also had to re-draw her hand blocking the sword in panel one - the blade slicing down between the fingers had slightly more "ouch!" factor too.

Panel four (the close-up of Aimée looking down) is one of those shots that look dodgy at the rough stage, but polish up quite well at the pencilling and inking stage. Despite a lot of time spent tweaking it, the  apparently-simple shot of Yakuza boss Yamaguchi in panel five never quite came right. I re-did this panel three times and he still ended up looking like a Kubrick. The sort of thing that makes me wince when I see it on the printed page, but with deadlines to meet, after three tries, you let it go.

Lowlife: Hostile Takeover Part Two

Aimee gives Frank a lift
Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part two, page four
© 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD 

Part two of Lowlife: Hostile Takeover was where my now well-documented dissatisfaction with Adobe Illustrator came to a head. While I'd been drawing part one I'd become more and more aware of how slow Illustrator was; it really was choking on all the little Carlos Ezquerra-style rendering lines I was putting into my pages. Illustrator stores every line as a separate, adjustable object, which means that rendering or hatching really does clog it up pretty quickly.

I hadn't got to grips with Manga Studio at this point, so I decided the try laying out and pencilling the pages in Illustrator, then see if inking them in Photoshop would be faster. Illustrator's various geometric vector tools allowed me to lay out panel borders, lettering and building perspective grids with much more flexibility than Photoshop permitted, but since I keep my roughs and pencils as simple as possible, Illustrator would still run pretty quickly for me.

Casino scene from page one of
Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part two
© 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD 

So I jumped in at the deep end with this big panel - starting with the solid blacks and adding outlines afterwards. The solid black stage was already proven - I use Photoshop to add those when I'm drawing Stickleback - but inking the outlines proved trickier than I expected.

The problem was the pressure-sensitivity of the Photoshop brushes - with the default settings on my Wacom tablet, they tended to suffer from a "jump point" where the lines would suddenly jump from thin to thick when a certain level of pressure was reached, something that fiddling with the controls in both Photoshop and the Wacom preferences could improve but not fix.

Worse still was that all the brushes were what I call "heavy" - they'd produce their thickest line unless the stylus was held off the tablet all the time. I'd expect to have to do this for Photoshop brushes that were mimicking real-world brushes, but the effect prevented me from ever mimicking the feel of working with a dip-pen, which is springy but which can be allowed to rest on the paper. Again, fiddling with Wacom and Photoshop settings didn't solve the problem.

On the plus side, having a page rotate tool was a big relief, and being able to straightforwardly erase things was lovely (I know Illustrator now has an eraser tool, but using it on variably-stroked lines can cause some weird effects). Being able to subtract via selection was handy, and having layer masks which allow me to reversibly erase into black areas was superb - something I wish Manga Studio could emulate.

But, in the end, it came down to this; the "heaviness" of the brushes meant I couldn't draw any quicker in  Photoshop than in Illustrator. For the next few episodes I hit on the compromise solution of doing the bulk of the inking in Illustrator and then adding rendering (and, as I always have, texture) in Photoshop afterwards.

I'll be interested to see if anyone can see a difference in the appearance of this episode.

A quick word about the bikes in this episode: for Aimee's bike I wanted something a bit different and futuristic. Inspired by the bodywork of a BMW prototype, I came up with the idea of a fly-by-wire racing bike with a saddle, fairing and control assembly that floated clear of the engine and wheels. This allows for computer controlled stabilization and steering override to help the rider cope with Mega-City One's 200mph+ traffic speeds.*

The Samurai assasins' monocycles were inspired by Ben Gulak's Uno bike.

*Source, Judge Dredd episode 1, 2000AD prog 2.

Finally, here are a couple of panels I was quite pleased with that mostly got covered in lettering. I knew they would too; I just have too much fun drawing backgrounds.

The back alleys of the Lowlife
Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part two, page four
© 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD 

Lowlife: Hostile Takeover Part One

Jon Davis-Hunt's trulys scrotnig* cover for 2000AD Prog 1700
© 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD 

2000AD Prog 1700 is upon us, and with it the first episode of Lowlife: Hostile Takeover. This one's a real roller coaster ride - there's gang war in the Lowlife as the Yakuza make a move on the Big Man, but can Dirty Frank stop them when he can’t even trust his own Wally Squad colleagues anymore? Part one finishes with a real bang and the story doesn't let up from there. I'm drawing episode nine of ten right now, and I can't wait to see how it ends.

Heavy Metal Kids from the Judge Dredd: Robot Wars storyline,  Progs 10-17
Art by Mike McMahon
© 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD

For Lowlife: Creation, I had fun re-creating a classic Carlos Ezquerra H-Wagon. This time round, I delved a bit further back into Mega-City history for the design of Trev the Robot. Keen-eyed long-time Squaxx** may spot that Trev is a slightly-modified Heavy Metal Kid, the demolition robot that formed the backbone of Call-Me-Kenneth's army in the Judge Dredd: Robot Wars storyline (Progs 10-17). He was meant to be old, second-hand and tough enough to break into bank vaults, so the fit was perfect. 

Cross-Dressing Trev the robot, from Lowlife: Hostile Takeover part one.
© 2010 Rebellion Developments/2000AD

*For non-2000AD readers: "scrotnig" is a compliment.

**For non-2000AD readers: "Squaxx" is not an insult.