2000 AD Covers Uncovered: Tom Foster’s Web Shop Exclusive Penitent Man Cover
13th March 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!
Today we have the return of Dredd artist Tom Foster to talk about putting together his web shop exclusive hardback cover to the collection of his and Ken Niemand’s zarjaz Dredd trilogy – A Penitent Man.
We all make mistakes – but when you end up on the wrong side of the Justice Department, is there any way of making things right?
That’s the big problem facing former Judge Kyle Asher on his return to Mega-City One after 20 years on Titan’s penal colony. Under close scrutiny from the Law and with Dredd taking a special interest, will there be a way for a penitent man to get by in the big Meg, or is his fate already sealed?
This is a collection of Niemand and Foster’s trilogy of A Penitent Man, An Honest Man, and A Fallen Man, all of which came out to great acclaim in the Prog. This is one of the best recent Dredd tales, leaning hard into the classic Dredd themes of justice and simply getting by in a system where the rule of Law can be absolutely brutal and unforgiving.
Tom’s come a long, long way since winning the 2013 2000 AD Art Portfolio Competition at Thought Bubble. After his first 2000 AD work, the Tharg’s Terror Tale: Done Deal, written by Alec Worley and published in 2000 AD Prog 1886, his distinctive and classical style, reminiscent of Bolland and Chaykin but developed into a style very much his own, meant further work co-creating and illustrating the first Storm Warning series. But he really came into his own on these three longer Dredd stories, with his art deservedly praised by all who saw and loved it.
So, without further ado, over to Tom to tell you all about putting together this cover for the web shop exclusive hardback of Judge Dredd: A Penitent Man. And, as usual, he’s already putting himself down…
TOM FOSTER: I’ve been accused in the past of denigrating my own work in these Covered: Uncovered features – but then again, I’ve also been accused of producing covers that aren’t very good – so, in the interests of even-handedness, I’m going to waver in my appraisal and try desperately to please everyone.
Things started out positively enough, with word from the editorial team that they were planning on releasing A Penitent Man collection and a request to produce a cover for the webshop exclusive hardback. I was genuinely very flattered to be asked and started sketching a prelim.
This first concept of Asher and Dredd looking at each other over their respective shoulders was rejected. It was felt to be too subdued and not enough of a contrast with the paperback cover. Something with a bit more action was required.
This presented a bit of a problem, as the story contains very few action scenes that contain both Dredd and Asher – and those that do often don’t really reflect the dynamic of the story as a whole. So, I decided to try a montage of action beats from the story, centered around a motif of Asher looking at his blood-stained hands – with Saturn and, more pertinently, Titan as a unifying compositional element for the background vignettes.
Hearteningly, this idea was rejected with less enthusiasm than the first, and there was a sense that we might be getting somewhere. It might, I was told, even be good enough to be approved at the editorial meeting, but, for the sake of certainty, it was advised that I produce something entirely action-oriented, even if it meant straying from the text a little.
So, finally, I produced the sketch that went on to be the basis for the finished article. I didn’t want to just completely invent a scene that doesn’t happen in the book, so settled on something that was quite obviously supposed to be non-literal – something that suggested the themes while clearly being a bit abstracted.
I borrowed the Saturn/Titan element from the previous design and made it a more explicit backdrop, representing Asher’s past exile, with the man himself vainly fleeing it. Dredd is in close pursuit and, amassed behind, a bevy of the book’s other antagonists give chase to them both.
It’s perhaps as well that Asher has no nose to speak of, else it might have been crushed by the weight of my symbolism.
With this idea approved, I went about doing a more detailed pencil drawing. I had already more or less made up my mind to paint the cover, both to differentiate it further from the paperback version and in an impotent attempt to try and give the whole thing a sense of prestige, so this was more of a value study than my usual pencils, which are designed to be inked.
For the painting, I decided to work at a larger scale than usual, in hopes of producing a more finely-detailed piece. I printed out a scaled-up version of my pencil study on two sheets of A3 printer paper and taped them to tracedown paper, which I used to transfer the basic outlines to a large piece of claybord, with a painting area somewhere between A3 and A2.
Then I did an underpainting in burnt sienna acrylic ink, trying as best as possible to match the values of the pencil version.
With that done, I started to add colour with soft-body acrylics. It had been a while since I’d done any painting, and my experience in the medium is limited, so this process took a while.
I couldn’t land on colours or tonal values that I was happy with and, for a day or so, I felt like maybe I had made a bit of a mistake in assuming I could paint well enough ensure any level of professional finish.
After a while of trying different things and remembering lessons I’d learned on previous paintings, things started to look a little better – but, as so often happens, the more detailed and dimensional the rendering got, the more I started to realise the weaknesses in the underlying drawing.
Proportions that had looked okay to me at previous stages now started to look odd and unrealistic and I began to regret not using any photo reference. Even a quick selfie might have helped, but at the outset I had felt that use of reference might only serve to take some of the dynamism out of the pose. Now that I was trying to give it some level of (albeit heightened) realism, the liberties taken with form only served to compromise their sense of weight and depth.
The trial-and-error process required to try and compensate for my inexperience in painting ended up eating pretty heartily into my time, so I couldn’t really afford to start the whole process again.
Plus there were elements that I quite liked. Asher’s face seemed, if not exactly bursting with life-like detail, at least appropriately lit and coloured. In fact, the whole effect of having the front of the foreground figure seemingly in shadow, while in reality being quite deliberately lit for clarity and impact, seemed to have been managed effectively. Also, the planet in the background had the oddly luminous glow I was aiming for, without competing too much with the figures. So, I decided to finish the painting up as much as I could in the time I had left and try to learn from it.
I think, compositionally, it more or less works. The colour palette, while it wouldn’t look out of place on a calendar in a Chinese takeaway, has a certain old-fashioned appeal. The figures have motion in them. Generally, the flaws are not things that leap out at first glance, but which become more obvious the longer you look at it. No one detail is so well-painted that it draws the eye, but no one element is so completely off as to be distracting.
So, there you go, I’ve managed to avoid saying definitively what I think of it. That should keep everybody happy.
Oh Tom, Tom, Tom, always putting yourself and your work down. It’s almost as though Tharg drills it into his art droids that they’re not quite good enough to keep them all in their place! Needless to say, it’s a great, great cover!
You can grab Judge Dredd: A Penitent Man from everywhere ghafflebette graphic novels are sold from 13 March 2024, including the 2000 AD web shop. The softcover is here, with Tom’s artwork on the cover, but even better is the hardback here with the exclusive cover he’s just shown you!
You want more from Tom? Well there’s plenty of Covers Uncovered from him – 2000 AD Progs 1986, 2225, 2281, 2310, 2341, his great Storm Warning cover for Megazine issue 450 and his just as great Surfer cover for Megazine issue 454. We’ve also interviewed him a couple of times – he talks about his 2013 Thought Bubble talent search win here and the Judge Dredd: A Penitent Man strip here. Finally, if you want to see and hear him, there’s his 2000 AD Thrill-Cast Lockdown Tapes appearance here and his far too funny From The Drawing Board video can be found here.