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!

This week, it’s time to look at the fabulous cover for 2000 AD Prog 2171, out right now, and featuring the return of Skip Tracer. And we’ve got cover artist Jimmy Broxton giving us a wonderfully in-depth tale of putting the cover together…

So, without any further ado, over to Jimmy Broxton…

I rarely do covers, and I approach them slightly differently to my interior storytelling pages. I’ll experiment with different styles and media, I sometimes have a prose book cover, or movie poster aesthetic in mind, not just a pin-up style piece of comic art with a logo slapped on it (not that there’s anything wrong with those sorts of covers, they can work a treat). This piece was no exception, fortunately, 2000 AD likes to do things differently as well, so when Matt asked me to do a cover for the prog featuring Skip Tracer, I jumped at the chance.

Matt’s brief was simple, ‘I thought maybe you could do the cover as a pulp neo-noir pastiche. Bit Blade Runner in tone.’

SOLD! Say no more, that was all I needed to hear, I’m already there, as that is so far up my neon-lit, rain-drenched alley that I can taste the raindrops, and the cover now exists fully formed in my mind, all that’s required is that I do justice to the vision in my head (almost never happens, but hey, we have to keep trying). And more importantly, the request from Matt, doing a cover is a big deal for me, so I want to get it right.

My typical working relationship with the mighty Tharg is an unusual one I think. Basically I’m sent a script, and I send back finished art, I rarely do roughs or layouts for myself, preferring instead to go straight to final art. So, no prelims, roughs, pencils or layouts usually exist, unless I’m running close to deadline, in which case I’ll provide (if requested) very basic roughs in order to allow the lettering to be done. This straight to art process usually works fine, with only very occasional requests for alterations or changes, it’s never to do with the interpretation of the script, more likely a question of content, and going a little ‘too far’, even for 2000 AD! More on that later.

(Initial pencil sketch)

Covers are different and need to be planned and balanced with other Progs, so I go through the proper approval process for a change! I produced a small pencil sketch (for my eyes only, well, until now), not much more than a stick figure doodle, but that was enough to satisfy me that it would work compositionally.

It wouldn’t, however, be enough to satisfy Tharg, he would need to see something a little more polished, something befitting a mighty editor’s inbox, rather than the inside of a school desk, where my woeful scribble belongs.

To that end, I digitally painted a rough of the cover, and dropped it into a cover template, with logo and publishing/pricing info. Very crude, but hopefully enough to sell the idea, it was more to suggest the colour values and the atmosphere I was trying to achieve, with no specific details on display. I brazenly submitted only one such rough, and Tharg the benevolent (it would seem) as well as mighty, approved it.

Now I had to draw it properly!

It’s worth noting at this point that, although that colour rough was created 100% digitally, I do in fact create all of my art the old fashioned way, with pens, pencils, brushes etc, on actual paper! Some digital compositing takes place, and the colours and special effects are done on screen, but the line art is real. I’ve yet to find a digital application that effectively replaces or improves upon actual wet ink on paper, with all of the multitude of variances and organic/analogue ‘accidents” that can contribute to a finished piece. Just call me ‘partially old fashioned.’

With a single point perspective composition like this, and with the figure front and centre, that figure, and especially the face and expression is key, so I drew the head separately, much larger than the body…

This allowed me to focus on his expression and work out the lighting patterns – as I was planning multiple light sources the shadow work had to be very solid.

Once confident the sketch was working, I proceeded to final inks for the head…

The body was then created as a second stand-alone piece of artwork, all to be ‘comped’ together later on screen.

With the figure complete, I could then tackle the background without worrying about figure placement too much. I created the entire street scene, with no hole or gap for Skip Tracer, I could add him anywhere at my digital leisure later (friendly advice, watch out for digital leisure, spend too much time with that and you’ll get no work done!)

I drew the scene, in ‘positive’ mode, which is to say, all the black and ‘shadowy’ bits.

I also produced a second drawing, where I inked all of the negative or ‘shining’ bits (technical term), lights, reflections, signs etc, this way I could create those effects with an analogue organic /vibe, to hopefully achieve a hand-painted, ‘none CGI’ final result…

With all the linework done, everything was scanned at hi-res (600dpi, thanks for asking), I then ‘comped’ the figure together by combining the head and body, and added the basic colours. At this stage, the scanned line art of the ‘negative’ elements were kept aside.

Referring to my original colour rough, I very roughly digitally ‘hand-painted’ the background in various layers over the black and white line art…

The colour render, minus inks, shows just how free-flowing and impressionistic the colours are…

The pre-coloured figure was pasted into position to complete the scene. I also added a flying car, as nothing screams ‘this is the bloody future’ like a flying car. The final image, will hopefully be greater than the sum of its parts, no single element stands alone, and the composition does not really succeed until all the separate elements are pasted into position, not unlike traditional 2D animation cells from years ago (hey, I said I was old fashioned.)

Finishing touches were then added, glowing lights, smoke, steam, extra lighting effects (including my inked ‘negative’ elements, now layered as highlights), typographic elements and signs (more on those presently) and finally a few extra layers of weather, rain, puddles and reflections.

At this stage, just for the fun of it, I created a ‘back cover’ version, the same image, just completed minus the figure…

The completed, flattened and print prepped file was set to Tharg for approval. Job done, well almost…

In my eagerness to give the image an authentic neo-noir, neon-drenched feel, I had strayed perhaps too far into the red light district of Skip Tracer’s world. ‘Live XXX’ and ‘XXX Nude’, in bold signage, might give the wrong impression of the contents of a magazine to be displayed prominently on a WH Smith shelf. Something ‘less saucy’ was requested and I thought it best not to suggest we simply go with it as is and poly-bag the Prog as a give-away with ‘Big and Bouncy’ magazine. I very wisely complied with Tharg’s request to tone down the sleaze (well, there had to be a first time!) The signs were changed, the ‘XXX ALL NUDE’ delights previously offered replaced by noodles (hey, even a pervert’s got to eat!) and that version is the final approved cover of the prog that will hit the stands any day now.

A huge thank you to Jimmy Broxton for an incredible breakdown of just what goes into making a cover. And what a cover it is. Go look for 2000 AD Prog 2171 on the racks of your local newsagent or comic shop right now!

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 the first of four awesome all-ages Regened Progs for this year, where the pages of the Galaxy’s Greatest get taken over by Tharg’s nephew Joko-Jargo and we get to see some wonderfully different all-ages strips featuring both familiar faces and new strips.

And the cover for Prog 2170 comes from the pen of the hugely talented Mark Sexton…

Sexton’s got more than two decades of comics and film work under his belt right now, but he sure does love coming back to 2000 AD. His resume includes storyboards for Alex Proyas’ cult classic, Dark City (1996), and work on, amongst many more, Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, Mad Max Fury Road, Black Panther, and Happy Feet.

He looks a little like this…

For comics, he was responsible for bringing Mad Max to comics as writer and artist on the DC/Vertigo Mad Max: Fury Road series. And for Tharg, he’s been responsible for a number of strips, including Judge Dredd: Ghosts and The Long Game (with Michael Carroll), Sinister Dexter (with Dan Abnett). And now he’s back on cover duties.

And, as is so often the case, it all started with another job unexpectedly disappearing… over to Mark…

It was all a case of being in the right place at the right time… I had been working on storyboards for an upcoming film when the dreaded word came through from on high that the studio was shutting the project down. Usually, I work on film but I absolutely love doing whatever I can for the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic; it’s been a dream of mine since childhood.

So whenever the opportunity arises, I annoy Tharg’s earthly minion Matt-1 with enthusiastic yet plaintive queries as to whether there might be something I could help out with.

In this case and in a desperate attempt to get rid of me, Matt-1 offered up the cover for the next upcoming Regened issue. In keeping with the theme, he suggested Cadet Dredd on the Lawmaster, and hastily left me to get on with it.

After the usual procrastination and stuffing around (and a polite email from Matt-1 asking whether there might have been any progress on the cover), I finally turned in a couple of rough covers. Working off the previous Regened covers, featuring iconic imagery of 2000AD characters against an almost featureless background, I went for a matching simplicity.

And because, for some reason, I have a thing about putting characters in a spotlight, I went for a black background too, which I rather liked and thought was potentially eye-catching…

Tharg and/or Matt-1, in their collective wisdom, immediately nixed the spotlight version, which goes to show why they’re the editors of the Galaxy’s Greatest and I am not. And a good thing it is too, I’d make terrible choices.

Because I work digitally, I pretty much go straight from rough to inks, developing the linework piece by piece, detail by detail. Probably too much detail really!

There was lots of fiddling with the scale of Dredd on the Lawmaster. The rough ended up feeling as though Dredd was too large against the bike, and as the image is supposed to be of Dredd as a cadet, it felt necessary to make him smaller and thinner. His head got a little larger in comparison, and of course, there’s always fun to be had riffing on the early Ezquerra/McMahon/Gibson uniform with its more rounded pads and helmet.

Speaking of which, this is the original Mark 1 Lawmaster, which I recall was featured in a brilliant futuregraph on the back of an early prog – an early version, before it was issued with the classic bike cannons mounted on either side of the front wheel. I checked this with Matt-1 as I didn’t want to get digitally burnt in effigy for getting it wrong; however I’m sure I got something else wrong, so I’m looking forward to doing my best Guy Fawkes impression when the Prog comes out… 

But I got to draw the classic Lawmaster for the prog. Huzzah!

I’m not a natural colourist – I think I’m a bit literal really when it comes to using a colour palette – but I figured I could get away with this one. I tend to draw my images so that they work in black and white as well as colour, so this didn’t feel like there was too much up for interpretation.

Still, I’m soooooo slow when it comes to colour, it takes me ages – I’m positive all those professional colourists out there could smash an image like this in a very short space of time and still make it look a thousand times better than I did!

Having said that, there’s always something magical about adding colour to an image, and it is fun. But I think next time I’ll leave it to the professionals!

All in all, this was a fun cover to do. Revisiting the old Dredd uniform and Lawmaster is always fun, and trying to make the image simple yet strong is a great challenge. Hopefully it worked!

Note to self: next time, check with Matt-1 whether we’re using a different logo – I worked off the current 2000AD logo and cover layout in composing this image, but only remembered that the Regened logo is a throwback to the original 2000AD logo once I saw this image in the promotional lead-up to its release. I hope it still works compositionally! I can just picture the design droids in the Nerve Centre abusing me roundly for mucking up their layout…

A last thought – I’d love to do more work for 2000AD, it’s always a pleasure to work on Dredd – even if he’s so complicated to draw! But hopefully I can start to loosen up in my artwork with the next story and try to get a little more dynamism into the art. There are so many brilliant artists producing stunning artwork for 2000AD, and there’s so much I see in their work that I’d like to try myself and change things up. Fingers crossed that Matt-1 doesn’t immediately delete my next enthusiastic yet plaintive missive.

It’s just occurred to me that the prog with this cover comes out only two days after my “birthday of temporal importance”, so that’s a nice little extra birthday gift. Almost like it was meant to be. Cheers Tharg!

Thanks so much to Mark for the great write-up!

You take a look at Pete Wells’ Covers Uncovered for Mark’s Prog 1973 cover , which looked like this…

And this Dredd for issue 26 of the Judge Dredd series from IDW:

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!

2000 AD Prog 2167 is out of the stands right now with a spectacular Zaucer of Zilk cover by Brendan McCarthy and Len O’Grady…

Co-written, drawn and co-coloured by Brendan with writer Peter Hogan and colourist Len O’Grady, the second series of the Zaucer of Zilk: A Zaucerful of Zecrets continues in the pages of the Prog – It’s every bit the phantasmagorical psychedelic extravaganza we’ve come to expect from the strip and Brendan and Len took a little time to fill us in on the making of a cover full of trouser trouble for the Zaucer!

As Brendan tells us, everything started with him planning a cover featuring Zaucer and a Fancy Pants riding T’Tooth facing off…

I wanted a cover that showed a bit of magical energy, and with the Fancy Pants and Zaucer in conflict.

Which led to this, Brendan’s first cover rough…

After that, he went through the usual pencils and inks stages before sending the final b&w version off to Len O’Grady, his colourist collaborator…

Now, over to Len O’Grady for a more in-depth look at the nuts and bolts required to get things together…

I got Brendan’s b&w cover and what struck me most was the sparseness of the composition; early on in the first run of Zaucer of Silk, Brendan had mentioned how the movie Yellow Submarine was big touchstone for the comic, and so for this one, my head went straight to the Jeremy Hillary Boob: The Nowhere Man and the Sea of Holes. I’d also rewatched THX 1138, and loved the screaming whiteness of the detention area in that movie, so seeing those floating figures brought it all together in my mind’s eye.

I’d used a dotted texture on Zaucer before to give a sense of depth in a floating space, and a touch of texture, so layered those behind the figures- I find it can give a bit of definition, especially when everything gets soft and supersaturated. My palette was a bit softer, but more stark against a white field.

Zaucer tends to turn into a bit of a sprawl (fifty layers is not unusual) as I try various fx, layering, masking, filters and the like, regularly going over the 1.5GB mark once opened, so I’ll condense everything down a bit and save that “final” copy.

This art went to Brendan in floating but condensed layers, to make things a bit easier for him to modify it- in the end it’s his baby, I just get to play with it- at this point we’re up to about 80% simpatico, and that’s a good level I think- it leaves room for surprise.

Anyway, I handed it back to Brendan and I’d like to think he opened up the cover and had a double-take – he’s incredibly generous and always encouraging me to let rip and see where I go with the colour.

Then a few days later he replies with where he sees it going, and that’s my favourite bit. By the end, this cover was probably the most divergent we’ve gotten, which makes it unusual.

Now back to Brendan again…

Len’s colours had the basic lighting dynamic down but I thought I could ‘remix’ it and push the colours further. It went through a radical background change but keeps most of Len’s lighting etc, but I sprinkled some glam rock fx over it.

All of which results in the next colour version, courtesy of both Brendan & Len…

Which eventually, with some more of that McCarthy glam rock fx, transforms into the final cover version…

Thanks to both Brendan McCarthy and Len O’Grady for drawing back the veil on the creation of the latest perfectly psychedelic in every way adventures of the Zaucer of Zilk.

2000 AD Prog 2167 is out now!

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!