2000 AD Covers Uncovered: Andy Clarke Gets Recycling With Megazine 470
17th July 2024
Every week, 2000 AD brings you the galaxy’s greatest artwork and 2000 AD Covers Uncovered takes you behind-the-scenes with the headline artists responsible for our top cover art – join bloggers Richard Bruton and Pete Wells as they uncover the greatest covers from 2000 AD!
Over to this month’s Judge Dredd Megazine now and another zarjaz cover from veteran art droid Andy Clarke – one of those perfect for any cover Dredds…
Andy’s something of a veteran amongst the art droids, with his first 2000 AD work coming in 1998’s Prog 1088. That means he’s been at this for more than a quarter of a century!
As with quite a few artists of the time, the Clarke droid first appeared in the pages on Sinister Dexter, a title he’d make something of his own in the next six years. His art also graced the pages of Dredd, Nikolai Dante, Shimura, Thirteen, and Snow/Tiger, the last two co-creations by Clarke.
After that though, the lure of the bright lights of those super-types beckoned and he headed off to DC Comics from 2005, where he’d have runs on Aquaman, Detective Comics, Batman Confidential, and many more. There’s also been work at Marvel, and Aftershock over the years.
But the lure of the Prog and the Meg is strong and there’s not many who can resist it. Also, the fact that Tharg does have a habit of taking photos of the droid Christmas parties seems to help. And so it is that Andy’s now something of a regular covers droid over the last couple of years, giving us that gorgeous, stylised line and magnificent textural work, you know, just like this latest Dredd.
So, over to Andy…
ANDY CLARKE: I think this was a general inventory-type Dredd cover – something that wasn’t tied to any particular story.
I tried scribbling up a few different ideas – none that I was happy with – until I decided to see if I could rework one of the discarded sketches for the Dredd Garbage Grinder cover. I always liked the pose (nothing special about it really, but I liked how Dredd’s face and helmet came out in the pencil rough) and luckily it got approval from Matt, so I went with it.
And here it is, a handy bit of recycling going on, as we have this discarded sketch from Prog 2287 (and you can see the Covers Uncovered for that one here) that Andy managed to find fresh use for here…
Following that, Andy’s happy to report that everything went rather simply and easily. No nightmares, no frustrations, no starting over, all rather boring really he says!
So it was the usual route of taking that initial sketch and re-doing it…
… then going from pencils to inks…
… and then adding all of that characteristic detailing you see on all of Andy’s covers in the greyscale…
ANDY CLARKE: The only thing different I can think of is that once it was all done, I colourised the greytones – turning them red to give the colours a warmer feel.
And here’s the colour flats that come from colourising those greytones, followed by the final stage, the fiddly, lots of work stage where he adds all the FX, the details, gradients, highlights, and the background, all of it with that typical Andy Clarke texturing that you can see…
Thank you so much to Andy for sending along the art that all went into creating such a great cover that you’ll find on shelves galaxy-wide from 17 July, as well as the 2000 AD webshop.
As for more Covers Uncovered action from Andy, be sure to have a look at his covers for Megazine 444, Prog 2287, Prog 2290, Prog 2312, and, from just the other week, Prog 2388. Plus, there’s that perfect thematic triumvirate of covers for the soon-to-be-collected and rather excellent Smash! that Andy was responsible for– issue 1, issue 2, and issue 3. You can get hold of Smash! The Broxteth Devil on 11 September.
And finally, a special treat for those of you who scroll this far down… blow-ups of Andy’s cover to show you all that absolutely superb detailing that goes into making Dredd look that good…
