Tag: coversuncovered

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 and the Judge Dredd Megazine!

Judge Dredd Megazine #416 is out this week with the first episode of new series Zombie Army: Last Rites iZombie writer Chris Roberson and Italian artist Andrea Mutti (Infinite Dark). Richard Bruton chatted to Andrea Mutti about his cover marking the start of the five-part series.

Written by Chris Roberson (iZombie) and drawn by Mutti, it’s full-on zombie war-time action and adventure down in Southern France, all under Mutti’s cover…

He starts by telling us that this was one of those cover images that, unusually, came really quickly…

Preparing for a cover is, for me, the most complex phase of a book … summarizing a story in a single image while maintaining its tension and atmosphere, is always a bit complicated! In the case of Zombie Army, however, it was almost immediate!

I didn’t know I had to do the cover too, but during the processing of the pages I had an idea of a possible cover that, yes, was very close to the ideas that Matt Smith suggested to me (great editor that I really thank for the wonderful opportunity!)

These are those extraordinary coincidences that make me love my job, those strange chemicals that arise spontaneously when you share a passion!

The first step for a cover is to create a quick layout that summarizes the basic concept. Once the procedure has been approved, I set about the pencil version that can be more or less detailed.

In this case, realizing that I’d be painting with watercolours, I looked for a fresher approach, I didn’t want to weigh down things with overly charged inks and with too many details that, once everything was painted with watercolour, would have been too dense and would have suffocated the colour.

With this in mind, I ended up painting the pencils and added black and ink details in a second step. The result, I must say, seemed immediately effective and I then added some details directly with the colours.

I also wanted to get a palette with few colours, I didn’t want a colourful patchwork as it’s still a horror story and I don’t particularly like too colourful illustration. Observing reality, light tends to blend many of the colours, giving a sense of homogeneity and density to real life, making it very balanced. And that’s something I really tried to achieve here.

Hopefully, all is well. The cover is what you see, and thankfully hasn’t come out too dark in the printing phase, something I always fear!

No, not too dark at all. A cover that really sells the new strip and one Andrea can be proud of. As always, thanks to Andrea for taking the time to take us through his cover. Now, grab your guns, it’s zombie killin’ time boys and girls!

Judge Dredd Megazine Issue 416 is out now!

Welcome once more to 2000 AD Covers Uncovered, where we get the art droids to spill the beans over the trials and tribulations of what goes into making the covers of the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic so very special…

Pete Wells started it all off and now, with Pete’s blessing, we’re carrying it all on. 

This time, it’s time for Rob Davis talking us through the latest appearance of the Mighty Tharg on the cover… It’s 2000 AD Covers Uncovered, it’s Prog 2159 (out on 27 November)… time to bow down once more before the Thrill Power delivered by Tharg!

Hopefully you all know Rob’s name already, given that he’s the author of the frankly incredible Motherless Oven trilogy, with the thid and final volume, The Book Of Forks, out right now from SelfMadeHero. It’s one of the best graphic novels of the year… do yourself a favour and check it out!

Now, here’s Rob Davis to take us through the latest cover for 2000 AD and the latest appearance of the Galaxy’s Greatest editor…

Matt [Smith – Tharg’s earthly representative] asked me to do a cover a couple of years ago for Counterfeit Girl and it was a lot of fun. It had been 20 years since I did anything 2000 AD related, but I really enjoyed doing it.

This autumn when I finally finished my trilogy of books for SelfMadeHero (The Motherless Oven, The Can Opener’s Daughter and The Book of Forks) I sent Matt an email asking if he had anything else for me. My timing was good because he had a cover that was looking for an artist and he offered it to me. He said he wanted Tharg on it.

Well, I’m of the generation whose first experience of 2000 AD was the 1977 TV advert with Tharg ordering us kids to buy his new comic (which we did!), so drawing him for the cover 42 years later sounded pretty cool.

I had a look through the archives and realised that there have been a lot of Tharg covers and most of the good ideas have been done, so I settled on a kind of montage of great thrills from the past cast like shadows in his cavernous imagination and Tharg the Mighty glittering like a jewel in the centre. I think I probably got as much out of the colour and form as I did the theme in the end.

In terms of roughs, I produced countless scribbles on scraps of paper looking for a simple composition that felt like a Tharg cover. I wanted him to look imperious, alien and mysterious, but really I think it brought the 2000 AD fan out in me and I enjoyed getting as many Thrills in as I could. It probably dates me how many of the characters I drew go back to the early years of the comic.

I sent this digital rough over to Matt. He said he liked it and was happy for me to draw it up…

Next in the preparation of the cover.. pencils…

I pencil my art on a wacom tablet in photoshop. I prioritise getting everything in the right place: the compositional elements, the blacks, the proportions, and the attitude etc. The line you end up with is a bit ugly drawn in photoshop, but that prevents me suffering the misery of the thumbnails or pencils looking better than the final inks. This is a perennial problem for comic artists who often find that the life they had in their initial thumbnail sketch can never be recreated in the final art.

And now to inking the thing…

I print out a blue line of the wacom pencils scaled up to A3 on Bristol board and then ink with a brush and indian ink or Pentel Brush pen. I try to inject some life into the inks if I can and also try to avoid too many unnecessary idiosyncrasies if possible. 

I was quite happy with Tharg’s head because it has a decent mix of figurative and abstract.

On one hand it looks like an interesting jigsaw of abstract 2D shapes on the other it looks like I’ve rendered the 3D form of the head. I always admire artists who find that line between those two approaches and that’s what I was aiming for there.

The next stage… adding in the colours

To make Tharg pop I used his spectrum opposite (violet) as the background. I also dropped the tone and saturation on the background. Hopefully when it’s printed the familiar characters in the background won’t be immediately obvious, but will emerge, like childhood hallucinations in a dark room.

Well, that was the idea anyway.

Thank you so much to Rob Davis for talking us through the latest appearance of the Mighty Tharg on the cover of his comic. We think Tharg will be pleased.

We heartily recommend you follow Rob Davis on Twitter here.

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Now… here’s that Counterfeit Girl cover for Prog 2008 that Rob was talking about…

And a few more of the appearances of the great and mighty Tharg from the past..

For more than 40 years, 2000 AD has dazzled the optical receptors of millions of Earthlets with its unique covers – 2000 AD Covers Uncovered goes behind-the-scenes and reveals how some of the industry’s top artists craft their cover art for the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic!

It’s time to join writer Kek-W and series artist Dave Kendall for more terrors and undead delights when The Dark Judges – The Fall Of Deadworld Book Two is released on 28 November.

It’s the latest terrifying instalment in The Dark Judges saga, as the four horsemen of the horror apocalypse continue to turn their world into the Necropolis we all know it becomes.

But first, cast your fearful eyes over the exclusive cover for the collection of fear-filled fabulousness as Dave Kendall talks us through its creation. It all began when Dave suggested a new cover for this collection….

The second volume of The Fall of Deadworld was due out and I suggested I do a cover to the volume. Keith Richardson was in charge of this project. Unlike the first volume’s cover, which was the 2000 AD cover for Dreams of Deadworld, this would be an exclusive for the book.

(Rough number 1 – Every time we play… he always has to be black)

My initial thought was that we’d continue a theme. On the first book, we have the three Lieutenants of Death standing in front of his statue. The one we see in Death lives. With this one, I played on the chess game featured in the story and have real Death manipulating simulacrums of his lieutenants on a chessboard.

I provided a couple of digital roughs and the second one was chosen

(Rough number 2 – For my next move, Judge Fire to the pit of skulls of my enemiessss)

The next part of the process was to plan the cover on a template of the cover. Just to make sure that the main elements didn’t clash with the text of the cover. Like my blueline process for the strip, I do this in Clip Studio Paint. In my opinion a far superior drawing program to Photoshop.

(Blue line in Clip Studio – what’s the betting he cheats?)

Once this was OK’d I transferred the image to Bristol board for the final pencils.

I pencilled this out enhancing the blue line image as I drew. This is the same process as my strip work. For every page there’s a pencil version.

(Final pencil version – Can we just play Monopoly next time?)

For the final version, I decided that I wanted this to be a traditional painting.

Once the pencils were complete I printed them on a high-grade smooth watercolour paper. This was then glued to MDF and then coated with Acrylic Matte Medium. This prevents the Acrylic paint from sinking into the paper. It was then a process of building up the paints until we reach the final finished painting.

Long story short, I roughly block in an under-painting then build up mid-range, shadows and finally highlights. Unfortunately, I have no process shots of this stage, but it’s a careful refinement of three or four stages.

I then scan into Photoshop and tweak the values of the image to give me the final cover image.

(Final cover – the crime is life, the sentence is chesssssss)

There’s always stuff I can change. I feel the cover printed a little darker to the final image. It might have required a higher contrast setting or a tweak to the values. I’m not sure. The printing process can be a strange old beast. There are reams of info on the cmyk process.

Overall I’m really pleased with it. There are always areas that could have been approached differently but a piece of art is never truly complete and inevitably it has to be let go.

(Final printed cover – Checkmate to Judge Death and Dave Kendall)

Wow… that’s what I love about artists… the creation of something so amazing as the final cover from initial idea to finished product and yet there’s still that nagging doubt, like the fingers of a new Dark Judge grabbing at you, that there can be something else, some improvement…

But when you see the finished cover, I think we can all agree that it’s a beauty alright, with that undead pin-up himself, Judge Death taking centre-stage in a cover to scream at you from the shelves!

Thanks to Dave Kendall for taking the time to go through that amazing cover.

The latest series of The Fall of Deadworld, ‘Doomed’, is playing out right now in 2000 AD and The Dark Judges – The Fall Of Deadworld Book Two is out on 28 November. Buy it or we’ll ssssssend the boyssssss round!