2000 AD Covers Uncovered: Riding out with Andy Clarke for Prog 2396
21st August 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!
Another week, another zarjaz cover to overload the thrill circuits! This week, showing us some of the action in John Wagner and Colin MacNeil’s incredible new Judge Dredd: Machine Rule, we have cover specialist art droid Andy Clarke…
It’s been (incredibly) more than 25 years since we first saw the Clarke droid’s art, with his first Sinister Dexter pages blasting into the Prog in 1998. He spent six years making the gunsharks his own, alongside runs on Dredd, Nikolai Dante, Shimura, Thirteen, and Snow/Tiger, those last two co-created by Andy.
Making such a splash at the Galaxy’s Greatest got Andy noticed Stateside, leading to runs on Aquaman, Detective Comics, Batman Confidential, and many more. But Tharg has a way of drawing errant art droids back to the confines of 2000 AD Towers, and Andy’s no exception, coming back to become a specialised covers droid for both Prog and Judge Dredd Megazine over the last few years. How does Tharg get the droids back? Well, that’s a closely guarded secret. But there is a rumour that he’s bugged the art droid’s cubicles and isn’t afraid to use the incriminating evidence!
So, over to a snot-filled Andy Clark and a short tale of Lawmasters…
ANDY CLARKE: I went with the nearest Lawmaster reference to hand, so that was Brian Bolland’s cover to the Origins paperback and Colin MacNeil’s art from the Machine Rule story pages that Matt sent through for reference.
Which, of course, gives us the perfect opportunity to show you that great Bolland Origins cover and some of MacNeil’s incredible artistry from the pages of Machine Law…
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Okay, back to Andy…
ANDY CLARKE: I did do a brief web-search to get a better overall feel for it – and to save a lot of time bodging about trying to get the angles right trying to draw it, I made a quick model in SketchUp, positioned it and used it as the basis for the drawing.
I wanted to keep the city as background – not really draw much attention to it – so left the buildings as silhouettes. And so it vaguely looked like somebody lives there, I dropped in some lights.
There you go, short, sweet, and full of snot right now! Get well soon Andy!
As for the actual putting together of it all, it was what seems like a pretty simple one, starting with the aforementioned SketchUp model of the Lawmaster…
From there, it was time for the familiar pattern of sketch, Tharg’s approval, pencils, and main figure inks…
After that, as we’ve seen before with Andy’s work, everything really happens in the greyscale stage, where all that incredible detail and texture first appears…
That greyscale image then gets worked up for colour, with Andy colourising the greytones first of all to give him the colour flats stage…
And all of that is followed with the final colour stage, where everything comes together with the addition of those final colours – not to mention the gun blasts, gradients, highlights, blurring, and just plain digital magic that sees the final cover looking like this…
Thank you so much to Andy for sending along the art for this one – a perfect cover showing you all the action going on in Wagner and MacNeil’s Machine Rule!
You can find Dredd riding out on the cover to Prog 2396, out everywhere the galaxy’s greatest is sold, including the 2000 AD webshop.
And if that’s got you wanting to see even more of Andy’s artwork for his covers, make sure you go through all his past Covers Uncovered pieces – Megazine 444, Megazine 470, Prog 2287, Prog 2290, Prog 2312, and Prog 2388. Plus, there’s the three covers he did for the soon to be collected Smash! – issue 1, issue 2, and issue 3. You can get hold of Smash! The Broxteth Devil on 11 September.