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, it’s a special end to the year (and oh boy, what a year – AGAIN!) with the annual Christmas Thrill-powered 2000 AD end of year Prog, Christmas Prog, just damn special all over Prog – call it what you want. And returning, just a month after his last cover, it’s Toby Willsmer for a double-cover spread of Zarjaz proportions!
The Xmas 2000 AD Prog 2262 is out, just in time for Christmas (funny that) on 15 December – from comic shops, newsagents, and the 2000 AD web shop.
.
Okay then… over to the artist… here’s Toby Willsmer…
TOBY WILLSMER: Matt asked me if Icould do a surging dynamic with aliens, spaceships and robots with maybe Tharg leading them on. After a quick back and forth he pointed out that it could be a wraparound cover to accommodate a busier scene, so we decided to go that route.
.
I already had an angle that I wanted to use for the surging effect, so went about adding in the composition figures that would use the main areas of space on the front and back.
At this stage there was one layout without Tharg and a couple of variations with Tharg. Matt went with the more zoomed in second layout with Tharg.
In those initial ideas, there was a spaceship zooming from front to back in the background, but Matt pointed out that the spaceship might be too Batwing-y in appearance.
At this point, I asked Matt if he wanted to add in a Christmassy reference in some way. His reply was ‘Can we have a rocket powered sleigh with an alien Santa in it instead of the wing spaceship?’
From there I made a more detailed rough with the edits to show what the figures would be.
.
Once approved, I drew the detailed line work and added some initial shadows.
.
From there I’ll add the base colours for the whole piece as a place to start from. These rarely stay the same as I add more and more colours over the top to make things look more vibrant, textured, and to make areas pop.
.
I usually work on one area at a time whilst painting but in this case, with so many cool parts, I worked randomly all over the piece until it was done.
This was a fun piece to work on and yep I do make laser gun sounds to myself when I’m drawing them!
.
There you have it – the third of Toby’s covers for 2021 – and we’re sure we’ll see him return in 2022! Thanks so much to Toby for sending along his thoughts and all that great artwork!
And we’ll be returning in 2022 with plenty more behind-the-scenes stuff in Covers Uncovered. And for even more Covers thrills, you can pick up the collected Covers Uncovered Annual 2021 in the 2000 AD web shop right now.
Enjoy your festive period one and all, however you celebrate it. Be kind, be safe, and we’ll see you in 2022!
