Covers Uncovered – Sometimes you’ve gotta make the first move – Frazer Irving on getting Prog 2395’s cover
14th 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 welcome return to the cover of the Prog this week for Prog 2395 as art droid Frazer Irving is back at 2000 AD towers after a long time away with his cover of the Baroness DeSilva from Mike Carroll and Joe Currie’s new thrill, Silver: Unearthed…
Oh yes, as things hot up in the Carroll/Currie droid strip where the last hope of humanity subjugated by the alien Sepsis may lie with the mysterious and deadly Baroness, it’s time to welcome back Frazer Irving – R-ving around 2000 AD towers – to the front cover. And what a cover!
Frazer started in the service of the Mighty One with a first appearance back in 2000’s Prog 1205, before getting to work on Dredd, and then co-creating two incredible thrills with Gordon Rennie in Necronauts and Storming Heaven (recently collected in volume 3 of the Best of 2000 AD series). He’d then go on to amaze on Sinister Dexter, Judge Death, and The Simping Detective. After that, it was over the pond to work at both DC and Marvel on the likes of The Authority, Klarion the Witch Boy, Iron Man, X-Men, and a memorable run on Grant Morrison’s Batman and Robin.
But like so many, R-ving knows you never really leave the house of Tharg, and he was back in house for the Scream/Misty Halloween Specials taking a trip up to The Thirteenth Floor.
But it’s been a long while since we last saw Frazer on the cover or inside the Prog. Why? Well, as he’s about to tell you, sometimes you need to let Tharg know you’re available to make a welcome reappearance…
He’s sent over process images, but he’s also gone above and beyond with two videos of the process – first we have the initial iPad sketch sent over to Tharg…
FRAZER IRVING: How did it come about? Well, it’s been a while since my last contact with Tharg and I figured he’d forgotten all about poor ol’ R-Ving over the years, but at MCM Comicon I spoke with David Baillie who suggested that maybe Tharg just assumes I’m mega-busy, and that I should send an email.
So I did, and within a day or two I got the offer to do a cover for this new thing about a Vampire. I was sent a page of internal art and a basic synopsis, and that was it.
Normally I’d wait a day or two before tackling the sketch, allowing the idea to simmer in my head for a while, but this time I decided to do the sketch straight off the bat, as soon as I read the email.
Matt had suggested the idea of the Baroness slashing at the reader, so I knocked out a sketch on my iPad in about 15 minutes...
FRAZER IRVING: That was sent off within an hour of getting the gig, and was green-lit straight away.
(And that’s why R-ving’s currently getting the cold shoulder from the rest of the art droids – oh, they hate it when one of them gets a green light without having to sweat through at least three different attempts to lay before TMO!)
FRAZER IRVING: I had some Flash Gordon covers to finish off that week, so I let the Baroness simmer on my iPad for 5 days, and then on the last day of May I decided to take the sketch to the next level.
Okay then, here’s the next process video, taking that first sketch and taking it, as the man says, to the next level…
FRAZER IRVING: As you’ll see in the process video the first step was to raise the resolution of the document and then bring some detail to the face.
Drawing in Procreate allows for symmetry drawing which is great for faces, and it worked a charm on this occasion. The reference art I had been given was fairly vague regarding details of outfit and facial features due to the style of the illustration, and in this regard, I had to make assumptions about eye size etc, and so I was pretty much just winging it at this stage, figuring that I could always fix it in photoshop later.
One aspect of digital art that has always appealed to me is the ability to emulate art styles that otherwise would require years of training in specific materials, and here I noticed that my loose sketch of the Baroness’s outfit had many textural similarities with the painted art of the late John Burns, an artist whose technique was an absolute marvel right thru to the end, and this gave the art a greater dynamic range when contrasted with the Photoshop contributions later on.
The arm was going to be a Photoshop job, mainly because I wanted to get some contrast in there, and using the different brush engines of the competing apps does that automatically, and also because I was sick of drawing on the small screen of my iPad Pro. There’s only so much Procreate I can take before I need a dose of potatoshop.
The red streaks were going to be redrawn, but partially out of eagerness to complete the art and also because I instinctively saw that they already had the energy that I was looking for, I retained and manipulated the streaks I’d sketched in over the initial doodle.
The colours were very simple, allowing the redness to unify it all, and not bother the painterly textures with any superfluous illustrative waffle.
The face was where much of the attention would go from here. Making the eyes crisp gave the figure that creepiness, the almost uncanny valley aspect that makes monsters work, and adding the blood over the top of the lips reinforced the idea that this is a vampire not just an old lady with bad skin.
Finally, the raking mitt. This was drawn rather swiftly so I could send the art off to Tharg before the close of the day, and where I would normally take a nice long break I decided to just bash out the hand...
The brushes I used for this had a very different feel to them than the procreate brushes and this gave that hand the nastiness, the Judge Deathness that it needed to be more than just an old lady’s hand, though I confess I have no idea how on-model it is when compared to the interiors, but I liked it.
The streaks were then tweaked to fit the nails, followed by a quick idiot-check to make sure I’ve done what was actually asked (believe it or not, but there are times when one forgets critical details of a commisssion such as “no mask” or “wearing original costume” that one only finds out once the work has been done), and I mailed it out to Tharg for approval. And approve it he did!
It was nice to tackle some 2000 AD stuff again, I always remembered the variety of subject matter to be one of the most appealing aspects of working for the Prog, and I’m looking forward to seeing it in the Prog!
Well, thank you so much to Frazer for sending all that along – any art droids wondering why Tharg’s not been in touch lately, take note! Sometimes you’ve got to not be shy and make the first move!
Let’s all hope that it’s not too long before we get more from Frazer, both on the cover and inside the Galaxy’s Greatest!
Prog 2395 is out right now and available in all the usual places you find your Thrill-Power, including the 2000 AD web shop
And for a final little bonus… the complete Shaun of the Dead prequel strip drawn by Frazer back in 2004, and written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright.
There’s Something About Mary serves as a prequel to the critically-acclaim and BAFTA-nominated movie, which has since acquired a cult following. The story takes one of the minor characters from the beginning of the film, a young shop assistant called Mary played by Nicola Cunningham, and shows how she came to be one of the first of the undead horde that Shaun, played by Pegg, and Ed, played by Nick Frost, must battle to survive. In just a few pages, the comic shows how her story becomes interwoven with that of Shaun and eventually leads her to one of the movie’s most hilarious scenes!
Shaun of the Dead: There’s Something About Mary – Published in 2000 AD Prog 1384, 7th April 2004. Script: Simon Pegg & Edgar Wright, Artist: Frazer Irving, Letters: Annie Parkhouse
