2000 AD Covers Uncovered – Get a Preece of the action with Sinister Dexter on Prog 2198
11th September 2020
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!
This week, its time to chat (briefly) to the cover artist for 2000 AD Prog 2198, Luke Preece. You can get hold of this stunning Sinister Dexter cover with the boys looking their best bad selves with 2000 AD Prog 2198, out in shops and from the 2000 AD webshop on 9 September.
Luke Preece is an illustrator based out of the West Midlands in the UK. He describes himself as ‘A child of the 80’s raised on a mixture of Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Comics, Movies and Metal music.’ Over the years, he’s worked with Marvel, Lucasfilm, Metallica, Slipknot, Ozzy, Sony Music, Music For Nations, Santa Cruz Skateboards, Metal Hammer, Xbox and more. But for 2000 AD, he’s was one of Tharg’s design minions between 2004-2011 and has a few gorgeous looking covers under his belt as well as being responsible for the design of the Judge Dredd Case Files.
And he’s a busy, busy, busy man which is why he’s had to send his apologies about this Covers Uncovered seeing as he simply didn’t have time to fill us in on the workings of making his latest 2000 AD cover featuring those bad boys of Downlode, Finnigan Sinister and Raymone Dexter as they look at taking down the A.I. that’s taking over the city in the ongoing Sinister Dexter – Bulletopia storyline.
Here’s what Luke emailed over to us…
“To be honest this cover was pretty straight forward to do. Matt Smith already had the idea of having the characters posing in front of the city skyline. It was up to me to make it a reality…“
See, that is a mean and moody pair of gun sharks right there. The epitome of cool against a Downlode sunset, posing for the artist before heading off to bust a few heads.
Over to Luke once more…
“Luckily, he liked my rough straight away so rendering final art was made easy because of this. It was also super fun as I’d not drawn these characters before.”
Which is why we have just the rough and the final, inked and coloured, cover for this one… but hey, that’s just fine when the end result looks just this good!
All that’s really changed from rough to final is that Finn’s had a bit of a hair tidy up and changed his jacket – obviously a man who likes looking his best for his cover shot. And Ray’s added just that little bit of extra product to the hair to make that quiff even more spectacular!
Thank you to Luke there for taking a break from a veritable mountain of work to send those over to us. It really is a stunning looking cover. Don’t forget to check out more of Luke’s work right here.
Now, as for Luke’s previous work, our esteemed colleague in Covers, the great Pete Wells, has chatted to Luke twice now, for the covers to Prog 2012 here and Prog 2048 here. And here’s just a smaple of Luke’s past 2000 AD cover work…
And of course, we couldn’t leave you without paying tribute to the incredible design work that Luke did for the Judge Dredd Case Files…
