Sunday Guest Post - Curt Sibling!

Third 'real' Scotsman in a row on the Sunday Guest Post, here's Curt Sibling!

Curt Sibling is a cartoonist based in Glasgow. His output includes swords and sorcery, tentacled cosmic terrors and offbeat humour. He is currently working on various projects but is perhaps best known as the culprit behind the underground comic "Total Fear." He started creating illustrations in 1990s.

Curt has had a varied resume, from character design with the BBC, to doing work for some well-known comics. His main focus is self-publishing, though.
Influences include Wendy Pini, Vaughn Bode, and Frank Thorne. Currently he teaches digital animation at UWS in Glasgow. Below are links to his work:

http://curtsibling.deviantart.com/gallery/
http://totalfear.blogspot.com/



The Guest Post on Sunday is open to all who wish to take part, so click here and join in!

Headshots

Not at all what i was planning on posting today but after a 3 hour plus journey home and sick kids awaiting me, an archive save was required. This was drawn in flash a few years back and is basically just some head shots of staff members from the company i was working with at the time.

Kinky Boots. 2009.

The original image (or pose) is from a Jean Paul Gaultier promo seen in Vogue Paris from December 1986. The figures and provocative nature of the image stayed with me all these years and I am glad to have finally committed it to paper (with some digital colouring) There is also a kinda Twin peaks thing going on with the curtains and floor but who hasn't thought of mixing those two together. There is also a Ranxerox nod in there too. Maybe a proper sketch of the hero next time?

From the vault

From Nosferatu to Vampire, and White Wolf's World of Darkness. Today, creeping from the Shadows of Mexico supplement, comes 'Feather's Flight', undead sorcery to follow the trail of your victimssssssssssss. You cannot killlll what doessss not liiiiivvvvve...... bleeeeaaaarrrrgggggghhhhhhhh!

Holy cow, this is four years old - how time flies eh!? More digital over pencil work today, in a very typical Hepworth rendering. I think this was still in the era when I was erasing from the bucket-fill multiply layer, rather than painting with tones on the multiply layer. A small but subtle difference. (C) White Wolf 2006

Nosferatu

I first saw the silent movie Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie Des Grauens when I was about nine years old very late at night (or was it early morning) on television. Something about this film from 1922 seemed much more real than any of the 70s Hammer films I liked to watch, in fact just about every scene is creepy and has a very unsettling feeling and appearance. The film is based obviously on Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' but changed in places to avoid legal issues, supposedly destroyed and missing for many years the film (and Dracula) is now part of the public domain so if you haven't seen this film you can check it out or download it here.

The actor Max Schreck who played Count Graf Orlok (Dracula) in the film is terrifying, his appearance is now so closely linked to how a Vampire is perceived. Strangely enough 'Schreck' is the German for 'Terror' and in this part he lives up to his name.

Jonday - surprise from the vault

So I do some work for the brewing trade. And I'm working on something just now which meant I had to go back and look at some older work. This was from a job I did last year for Wychwood Brewery, for the label of their White Wych Ale. Sometimes you pull something from the back catalogue and it can surprise you. I thought this feller looked pretty durned cool, even if I do say so myself, which apparently I do.

I did the colouring job - I wish I could credit the lovely pencils, but I can't unfortunately. If I find out who did them I will edit the post to reflect that, of course.

(C)2009 Wychwood Brewery

Sunday Guest Post - Robert Thomson!

Who doesn't like that classic British comic character Dan Dare? Nobody that's who. Robert Thomson does too and he's sent along two great illustrations for us to check out.

Currently residing in Glasgow where I've lived and worked all of my life. I'm employed at the moment by the N.H.S dealing with the administration side of things. My inspiration with regards to my artwork is, I suppose, anything that's fantastic or absurd. I try to keep things realistic although previous art jobs have included working on characters such as Loby Dosser.

As for the materials I use, well, I went through a phase of religiously using Isograph technical pens but with quality art materials becoming more and more scarce I've settled on pigment liners which come in a variety of nib sizes. My art heroes tend to be the old school of illustrators such as Frank Bellamy , Frank Hampson (the Dan Dare link) and Virgil Findlay among others.

Thanks for sharing these with us Robert. Although he doesn't have a website or gallery for us to check out Robert has pointed us in the direction of the Scottish Cartoonists Forum where he has posted more of his work, go check it out.



The Guest Post on Sunday is open to all who wish to take part, so click here and join in!

Hot head

Spent all my spare time this week sorting out my numptiness so a doodle from a while back this week. This was originally a self portrait sketch done with a standard day-to-day biro, but i decided to experiment with some digital colouring on it to turn it into a Human Torch sketch.

Captain America.

Another sketch from Paris Manga.

Aplogies to all the Scotch Corner followers for the late post. Real life has intervened yet again.

Redcoat WIP

A little work in progress on a belated Wednesday night - Some British infantrymen from the napoleonic era. I'm messing about with Artrage to try to get to grips with the oil brushes in the program, but I don't use it quite enough to get the most out of the tool - really need to tackle an entire job with the program to get to grips with it.

Dinnah, dinnah, dinnah, dinnah... Batman!

Best laid plans washed away by a broken boiler in my studio. I had planned to draw a nice new picture for today's post but the aforementioned problem halted those plans. So its back into the archive for me today and an oil painting created back in 2000.

Looking at this now I can spot a good few problems with the work especially the static look of Batman who is supposed to be in the midst of some incredibly energetic and action packed movement but overall I think it still holds reasonably well as an image and some of the brush work is pretty pleasing. Also it was painted onto an oil board and the grain coming through it was not a fun surface for this painting, if you click on the picture to see it larger you'll see the surface demanding its place in the limelight.

Jonday - Name's not down, you're not coming in.

And get a wash you hippy minotaur!


Another one for my German friends at Uhrwerk Verlag.

Sunday Guest Post - Dominic Regan!

We have a brilliant contribution this week from Dominic Regan who has sent us lots to check out including six pages of his own strip.

I've been drawing comics for longer than I care to remember but I've been making money from colouring other peoples artwork for the last few years. After colouring Henry Flint in the Omega Men mini-series and I then coloured a few other bits and bobs for DC.

My own comics are apparently too strange for a “mainstream” comics audience, which I, somewhat perversely, interpret as meaning that I must be doing something right.

All the art I've put forward for consideration by Scotch Corner is from a story I'm working on called “The Devil's Pawn”, which I describe as “Stone-Age Sci-Fi”. It's primal adventure with talking gorillas, Lovecraftian aliens and high-octane psychic combat set in Africa at the dawn of humanity about 300 thousand years ago. I intend this strip to be primarily available in a digital format but if someone wants to pay me for the honour of printing it, I probably won't say no.



Great work and you can check out more of Dominic's work at his own website and his Deviant art page. Thanks for sharing Dominic!



The Guest Post on Sunday is open to all who wish to take part, so click here and join in!

Desert Storm

Another experiment this week with textures and photo manipulation. I basically took some photos of sky and clouds, 'noised' them up and distorted to create a storm effect. At some point in the proceedings i decided to make it a storm on an alien landscape - no particular reason just felt like it. Initially i was going to draw or paint an alien city and mix it into the storm landscape but since i was deciding to experiment i went about it a bit differently instead. Found some random bits of rubbish in the garage that were destined for the bin (where they now reside, but at least found a use for first) and made a random abstract 'model' from them (old bits of ping pong balls etc. - see pics below). Albeit that most of the texture and details are lost in the final comp, i ended up with different shapes and forms than i would have if just drawing normally, so probably worth it for the sake of an experiment.

Wedge Antilles, X-Wing Pilot.

This sketch of Wedge Antilles was one on many drawn over the weekend at the Paris Manga event. The Star Wars link was helped by a couple of the actors appearing as the show's media guests. Mostly superhero inspired sketches over the course of the day but Wedge (and the X-Wing itself) proved very popular. All drawn from memory and not bad considering it has been over ten years since I last worked on the books.

Have included a selection of the other Wedge Antilles sketches below for comparison.

Fantasy cover

Some classic fantasy this week, well in subject matter at any rate. A Liche, or Skeleton Knight or somesuch bears down upon the unfortunate adventurers. I recall back in November, that I was trying to be Angus MacBride (again) and didn't like the image because I felt I fell short (of course) of his skill. But today when I had a look I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't the nightmareish image (in terms of my execution, not content) that was in my brain.

It is a bit strange the way I perceive my own art - sometimes I can love a recently finished image and come to dislike it, other times feel a picture really falls short of was wanted and then come back later to be quite positive about it. Ahh well. Must try not to worry about such things, eh? (C) Cubicle Seven 2010

Life everlasting...

One from my past. I'd asked my friend and writer, Richard Harris, to write a short story for me based on chilling story he recounted to me one lunch time. He dutifully delivered the words and I illustrated four pieces to go with the story including this acrylic and oil painting that sets the tone for the whole piece. According to my computer files this was painted in November 2003 but I'll have to take its word for that. The story was scheduled to appear in the US horror magazine 'Carnopolis' but it unfortunately closed the issue before the story appeared so its never seen print anywhere which is sad story in itself. If anybody knows a horror magazine that would like a short illustrated story then send them my way :)

January Competition Winner!

Congratulations to 'Jan' our winner of the January Competition for his comment:

Not knowing what "bijou" means, I thought of "bijuu". Which is a Japanese word for tailed demons.

Jinchuriki and their Bijuu

Yep, me know no French. But I do watch Naruto. :D

Oh, prints! Would love to have those! Especially the right one, it's such a classic image, but with a few subtle twists. I've moved to a new room recently and its walls are so white and empty. These prints would surely make it feel more like home.

Your prize will be sent onto you as soon as we receive your mailing address!

Jonday - Dragon in Progress

A work in progress, Artrage, Photoshop. Probably about an hour in:

Sunday Guest Post - John Higgins!

To try and briefly sum up John Higgins prolific output would take more space than Blogger allows. Lets just say that we are very happy to have John join us this Sunday and you should take a wander over to his website and just look at the list of work he's produced! Here's a great interview with the man himself which helps show the legend he most certainly is.

I don’t do as many fully painted images as I would like, and I miss it, but this is one I did of a character called Ross, part of a Trans-Dimensional detective team, her partner Frame is your typical hardboiled detective type. They are the only defense Earth have against an evil female entity called Razorjack who’s sole purpose, once she had discovered the existence of the Earth, is to breakthrough from her twisted world into our time and space, and to lay to waste all she would survey. This was the cover for the 2009 collected edition of the Razorjack Graphic novel, published by com x, a hard-boiled, SF noir story set on strange and weird worlds and between dimensions.

This image was traditionally painted using acrylic paint on water colour paper, then scanned into Photoshop, the back ground a “dimensional” veil was painted onto a separate sheet of water colour paper, this was also scanned into Photoshop. I tweaked the contrast on the gun to enhance its “weight” and also used the Dodge tool to brush up the metallic sheen on the gun, and layered the separate paintings to make the transparency of the Dimensional veil work in a subtle way against the white of the cover background.

The Guest Post on Sunday is open to all who wish to take part, so click here and join in!

Monster mash

This is from a set of images i did for Quarto Publishing back while i was still finishing off my graphic design degree. The various illustrations were used in a "How to illustrate comics" book which i can't actually remember the exact name of (I was never sent a comp copy and being on a student budget at the time didn't want to pay full whack - numpty in retrospect as it's pretty hard to track down an old copy even on ebay now - doh!)

I had to rapidly learn the basics of digital colouring for these as they gave me that task too. I guess they assumed i knew how to do that (and i wasn't telling them any different) and were willing to gamble as i was being paid 'student rates'. I would do them completely different these days -but it was a good learning job.

Did quite a few images for the book and i'm sure a few more will probably pop up here on occassion (if i can find digital copies)

Machine Man and Silencers.

From the vaults.

This week I am featuring a portfolio piece done in a couple of hours before an interview with Glasgow based Red Lemon Studios a few years ago. It features Litany and Gitane (from Silencers) and Machine Man from Dark Horse Comics (who I drew in the Mask World Tour series from March 1998) Very pleased with this study and the speed at which it was done.

The interview went well enough and I received some good advice at the time.

More VTES

Rushed off my feet today, so not much blurb - Vampire rat girl from tomorrow's release of Vampire The Eternal Struggle Card game! (C) White WOlf 2009

King Monkey!

Here's a recent job sample I was asked to produce featuring the 'King Monkey' of the Madchester music scene Mr Ian Brown.

While I'm here I'll drop a quick mention that not only can you win original art and other goodies in the Starblazer competition here on Scoctch Corner this month but you can also win an inked sketch over on my own blog. So go check it out!

Jonday colour

Personal life is in overdrive at the moment, with a new baby arrived on Saturday morning, but luckily I have some commercial work that's snuck out from NDA recently.

Here's some colour interior work recently completed for my friends at Uhrwerk Verlag in Germany. Looks like it's shaping up to be a very exciting world they're building over there, and I'm happy to be a part of it.


(C)2010 Jon Hodgson

And to see bigger: http://img694.imageshack.us/img694/9098/126qh.jpg

February Competition – Starblazing Original Art!

Over the last two weeks Graeme has posted up his work on his homage cover painting to the comic Starblazer and for this months competition we stay with that theme. Once again you can get your hands on some original art in the form of the A3 pencil art for the finished painting. Also we will throw in an A3 print of the final painted Starblazer cover and to complete your Starblazer memories we will also send you a selection from the original comic series.

So that's an original pencilled piece of art, a print of the cover and free comics to go with it all!



It couldn't be easier to enter, all you need to do is leave a comment about the prize and you'll be entered into the running. So leave your comments and as always any kind of comment counts but you have to make sure you think about it as you can only enter once, so make it funny, make it complimentary, make it a song, make it weird, make it anything you want but make your comment count. Please make sure that if you do not have a Blogger profile email address that you leave a contact email after your comment.

Terms of entry: 1. Only one entry per person. 2. Comments must be left by the end of 28th February 2010 to be entered into the competition. 3. The contributors to Scotch Corner will judge the comments left and decide a winner with the contributor supplying the prize having the casting vote. 4. The winner will be announced on the website as soon as a decision has been reached. 5. If the winner does not have a contact email address available on their comment profile then it is the winners responsibility to contact Scotch Corner at scotchcorner@me.com and supply mailing address details. 6. If the winner does not contact us after one full month a new winner will be chosen. 7. All decisions are final. 8. If you are unhappy with any of these conditions please do not enter.