2000 AD Covers Uncovered – The spider-man is having Dredd & Anderson for dinner tonight

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 we welcome artist supreme Patrick Goddard to Covers Uncovered with his great cover for 2000 AD Prog 2205, out on 28 October – get it from the web shop!

It’s one to delight the arachnophobes amongst you, with Patrick giving us Dredd and Anderson having a little spider trouble – as seen in the second and final part of the Dredd tale, ‘They Shoot Talking Horses, Don’t They?‘ by Rob Williams and Dan Cornwell.

Patrick’s been part of 2000 AD since Prog 1220 back in 2000. His first credit was the Sinister Dexter story Lucky and since then we’ve seen his work on Aquila, Armitage, Savage, Mean Machine, Judge Dredd, Judge Anderson, and the raunchy recent adventures of Devlin Waugh in Judge Dredd Megazine.

This latest cover, as Patrick says, was pretty simple, with Tharg giving him a brief to scare the bejesus out of anyone with a spider problem… so, over to Patrick to give you the skinny on his latest bit of cover magic, as coloured by his comrade in arms, Dylan Teague…

Tharg asked for an upward shot of the pair hanging in the well with the threat of spiders coming towards them. There was no need to play with a variety of compositions so just did what I could.

How many ways can Patrick put Dredd and Anderson through the mill this time?

I had some ref of Dan’s artwork to help and played around with some ideas of say, having the Spiders huge in the foreground with Dredd and Anderson pretty small in the back ground. 

Tharg went for the mid shot of the figures so I used a bit of artistic license to add some webbing around them so I could show the spiders in more detail crawling towards them.

Uh, Joe, there are some nasty looking squiggles coming to get us…

I did a quick sketch of the figures quite small (as it’s easier for me to get the scale right), blew it up on my photocopier and lightboxed the pencils onto the art board.

Oh hell, bring back the squiggles, I prefer the squiggles Joe!!

Add some ink and it’s all done!

And then it’s over to the master colourist Dylan Teague who did a great job.

I hope that’s ok? It’s always pretty straightforward when Tharg knows what he wants.

Ok? Oh, it’s just perfect. Fear the 8-legged nightmares everyone!!!

Thanks as always to Patrick for giving us a look inside making this latest wonderful looking cover. If you’re after more Goddard goodness, be sure to check out the cover process for Prog 1865, Prog 2185, and Prog 2021. And be sure to follow him on Twitter – @PaddyGod1.