Lee's Art Dump Journal

A Good Sit-Down

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:31:42 GMT

A wee sketch of the main characters from Headstone Blues have a lovely, manly meal together.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 11:50:22 GMT

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, youse. Here's to 2008!

(Apologies for the the return of Highly Questionable Santa, it's just he got some good feedback last year...)

Iraq Book Roundup

Sat, 08 Dec 2007 00:08:24 GMT

Well, the Institute of Contemporary Arts panel was flippin' great. Many thanks to everybody who turned up and sold it out! I was a bit nervous, but I thought I managed to engage the audience pretty well.

Here's a few photies.

One side of the Nash Room Lecture hall at the ICA, before everybody turned up. Friendly tech guys can be seen rummaging about checking everything works.

The view out from the balconies of the Nash Room, of The Mall. Trafalgar Square is off to the left, and Buckingham Palace is down the road on the right.

See just how exciting it was... Heh. That's me in the white shirt, writer Sean, then Ruth from War on Want and Paul Gravett on the far right. I don't have any photos of us talking at the event, but I've nicked this one off Sean. We're working on getting some from War on Want, who were snappin' away while we were gabbin' away.

The book on sale in the ICA bookshop! And sign copies of it in the bar afterwards we certainly did.

Scan of the ICA's events programme with - unlikely as it seems - some of my artwork alongside Posy Simmonds'. Will wonders never cease?
We've been getting some great press for the book, which just goes to show what the Press Officer of an International charity can do for your project. Look! We were in The Guardian Guide, where they used the cover to the Iraq book to sum up the whole of the ComICA 2007 festival. Blimey.

The book's being reviewed by Paul Gravett in the December issue of Plan B Magazine. There have been reports on the book on; BBC Arabic, Reuters (In Korean!), United press International (UPI), the multi-lingual Euronews, French news service France 24, and on the radio in Austria and in print in Dubai! Apparently, we were nearly on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, too. Click all those links above for articles and videos (of Sean looking glamourous in Gosh Comics in London, talking about the book...) The nice little promo video used was put together by a lovely fellow called Adib at... Al-Jazeera.

So...

The book's out now. and y'know what..? It's available to buy from from the War on Want website, and the Boychild Productions website. It's also in the December issue of Previews, on page 350 or so, under Boychild Productions, order number DEC07 3504.
G'wan and give the gift of charitable comics this year.

ICA Panel Details (or, 'They let us have comics in the building and talk about them')

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 16:31:49 GMT

Get a load of this, you can come to London and see myself and Sean talking about our Iraq: Operation Corporate Takeover graphic novel in a proper Arts venue and everything. We'd love to have you along.

It's at 7pm on Tuesday 6th November, in the Nash Room at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.

More details on the event listing on the ICA website. The ICA is here. The nearest tube station's Charing Cross.

We'll be sharing the stage with the savvy twosome of Dan Goldman and Anthony Lappé, all the way from that there North America, whose webcomic Shooting War is so good that even I've heard about it.

This is all part of the ComICA 2007 international comics festival, organised by the Man at the Crossroads himself, the unequally wonderful Paul Gravett.

Anybody with tips on how to actually appear interesting and intellectual, as opposed to Just Some Guy Who Draws Stuff will be rewarded with, erm, drawings..?

Iraq: Operation Corporate Takeover - The Cover!

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 22:48:32 GMT

The Iraq book has a name, and it's Iraq: Operation Corporate Takeover. It's at the printers in Quebec right now. Here's the final cover:

The guys with the guns are Private Military Security Contractors: mean mercenary sumbitches who are numerous in Iraq and don't have to answer to anybody. Like the many other issues going on with the country currently, they have their own part in the story.

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 19:34:31 GMT

I've been working on a pretty big project recently - a docu-drama graphic novel published by the International charity War on Want all about the reconstruction of post-invasion Iraq.

It's a 74 page book - with 54 comic pages and the rest being supporting text - A5 Digest sized. Written by everyone's favourite glamorous Scotsman who lives in Japan Sean Michael Wilson of Boychild Productions. Pre-press help from Ian Sharman of Orang Utan Comics, and proper factual and legal help from the lovely bods at the charity.

Here's a few pages...

This is from a scene in the story set at a protest staged by Oil Union workers. It's really good to be working on something that's not just explosions and car chases, but actually about a proper issue.

The book's being launched at the Institute of Contemporary Arts' 'ComICA' comics festival in November. Not bad, eh..?

The Essence of Tong

Sun, 22 Apr 2007 23:07:44 GMT

It's been a funny ol' weekend, thanks to what I've been upto:

Little gift for the people who make the BBC videogame show Videogaiden and it's original web counterpart, Consolevania. They pitched a game to Rockstar games - the company who made Grand Theft Auto series - entitled 'Manpuncher Versus Boxhead'... Hee.

And now a couple of pieces for a small press anthology all about song lyrics being put together by the wonderful Paul O'Connell, who produces 'The Sound of Drowning', a small press title that's also wonderful.

That'll be 'Dr Buck's Letter' by The Fall...
What's that? popular DJ Pete Tong being chased by a giant, disembodied Mark E. Smith head and accomplices..? Well, the idea for this come from an old LJ art meme thing involving drawing your favourite band, which I never got around to doing anything for. The Fall's lineup has changed over forty times, so that's the reason why there's a difference in scale in the characters. I feel slightly guilty about not being able to get a likeness of Mark right and just settling on making him look angry to make up for it...

I feel like a right emogoth posting this. Sigh. This is what the music of Angels of Light and The Swans will do to you. Children, if someone says to you, "Let's go back to my house and listen to a Swans record," Just Say No.
I know this seems trite, but sod all that death metal rubbish, this is among the darkest music you will ever hear in your short life. Seek it out.

Headstone Blues II

Tue, 17 Apr 2007 22:49:54 GMT

Italian comic pitch all coloured and lettered and looking alright, h'actually.

Headstone Blues is all about corruption and racism in 1930's Tennessee. The pitch pages of the porlogue here involve the arrival in town of travelin' Lenny Crane the bluesman, and the pillar of the local black community just about to discover he's being framed for murder.
It's being pitched in Italy by my homefellow Alessandro Cremonesi.

"If only we had someone with the powers of jungle creatures!"

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 20:55:51 GMT

I forgot about this - it's a photie from the Birmingham Comics Show (Or, "Brumcon", to you and me) last year. With the apparent 70th anniversary of pulp costumed adventurer The Phantom, the organisers came up with the idea of putting up some big, blank boards for people to draw on, so they could assemble 70 drawings of The Phant' in honour of his 70 crusty years.
First up was Marvel's Staz Johnson, who supplied a great starting point (on the far right of the picture), which then ended up looking a bit lonely for a day or so in the middle of a huge load of white boards, until people gradually cottoned on that that was as far as it had been planned. Under the cover of darkness, confident they weren't going to get a hand-slapping, groups of small press artists descended on the locale to scribble their own Ghosts who Walk'd down, including myself and the incomparable Al Ewing.

He had this magic (or something) ring, The Phantom, y'see, that let him into his secret jungle cave lair, as I learnt from watching bad cartoons in the '80's and mid-'90's. So that's where the thought behind this one came from.
(Looking at it now, I shaded his upper arm wrong, consarn it!)

Oh, and anybody who correctly identifies the quote in the title of this post gets a free sketch. :)

Holiday Haul

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 22:57:41 GMT

2006 is dead. We killed it. Long live 2006! Happy New Year, you lot.

Here's some scans and photies of some artistic (eh?) presents I gave my friends for Chrishmash;

That's a promo image for the greatest fictional 80's Hair Metal band who never actually existed, 'Throb Daddy'. Sample song title: 'Get Your Rock Out'. I'd like to say thanks to the people who did the band 'Dokken'''s artwork for most of the inspiration behind this. That and trying to crowbar as many cliches into one image as possible... Oh, and for holiday fun, try and spot the badly-concealed knob joke in this image...

That's a painting of a cat and a horse having a fight. Dressed as each other and wielding themed weapons... Eheh.

Mucha-me-do.

I don't know either. That is a big stick though.

It's No-Figure-Reference ahoy in yet another 'Nightcrawler' painting. I don't actually like the X-Men or anything.

I like giving away unique little messes like this, it's better than just throwing DVDs at people. And It gets me away from using pen and ink all the time...

Happy Non-Denominational Festive Period!

Sat, 16 Dec 2006 23:33:09 GMT

Highly questionable Christmas card placeholder for all you lovely people.
Thanks for reading. :)

Headstone Blues

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 17:10:11 GMT

A promo piece for a comic pitch called 'Headstone Blues', written by Alessandro Cremonesi, for touting about at the Lucca comics festival in Tuscany...

Splurge

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 16:59:54 GMT

Three paintings I've splurged out in great messy daubs recently, all of them birthday presents for various peeps:

For a girl with a 'Nightcrawler' out of the X-Men fixation. Well, I might have cured her of it, the amount of blue-bloke filth I've drawn for her...

This is, in actual fact, Manny from the PC game Grim Fandango!

For a dude who's getting played on BBC Radio 1, y'know.

(I've put the full painting title in the 'Alt text' setting for that image, in the hopes it'll throw off some history student on Google some time in the future...)

Yarrrrrgh!

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 16:46:27 GMT

There's an amiable young man called James Harvey who comes and leaves nice comments on my LiveJournal - he's an Animator, don't you know. Anyway, he's undertaken a massive project, which involves him drawing 100 Pirates in 100 Days... Take a look at the link and you can see a fantastic imagination just running wild. Seriously impressed by the amount of moxie he has, I did a 'Guest Pirate' for him...

The Skeletons in my Closet Have Big Eyes

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 17:16:59 GMT

Me colouring up some old linework (2003? 2003?) from my sketchbook. Yeah, it's more Vurt stuff. I once read in an interview that Jeff Noon gave - about his novel being translated into Japansese - "...The Japanese one's great," says Jeff, "but what I'd really like to see is the manga version. I'd love to see Scribble [the main character] with those big eyes..." And so this kind of happened.

The thing is, it was manga that got me drawings comics seriously in the first place... The work of people like Masamune Shirow, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto and Katsuhiro Otomo were like pure, distilled ideas and outlandism compared to any 'Western' comics about... In the mid-nineties the small U.K. monthly mag Manga Mania was the bible, as far as I was concerned... The slightly ironic thing was that from the mid-nineties to the turn of the millennium, even though I was was rabid for it, larger circles weren't bothered with manga at all really. It was a level point between Manga Video's initial 'violent cartoons for teenagers' explosion, and Tokyopop's current dominance of bookstores.

If I can sound even more self-involved, think the linear aspect of my style - although flavoured later on by European comics - definately came from Manga's concise nature. My natural sense of pacing in graphic storytelling is also much, much slower, 'glacial', even - compared to the frame breakdowns in the scripts I artwork...

Not that I'm complaining or owt. :) The bottom line is though, it's all comics, no matter which way you hold or read 'em. Yay.

Charactersheetgasm

Sun, 03 Sep 2006 19:05:35 GMT

'Ello. "What are you doing?" I hear you shriek, in an almost disbelieving fashion.
Well, I'm about to start drawing a 4-issue miniseries from Platinum Studios, written by the very prolific Mr. Steven Grant. How about that, eh..? (How they matched him up with a chancer like myself is anybody's guess, but it's not like I'm going to argue...)

No pages yet, but I do have approximately a 'shedload' of character sheets to show you, in both Sketchy-Vison and Tight-O-Vision:

^ Is it that obvious that this iteration of this character was based on celebrity mucus receptacle Paris Hilton..?

^ Thanks to Paul O'Connell for giving me the idea of basing this guy on "Controversial Film Director" Vincent Gallo.

The pages come when I get the artboard in the post, kids!

Ladies' Night in the New Romantic Robot Factory

Sat, 29 Jul 2006 11:59:01 GMT

Gift Doodle for an old friend who got back in touch, in which I mostly just take the pish out of her for liking Duran Duran:

Also, I'm definately not gay or owt.

Love hidden in the attic

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 19:27:08 GMT

My little comic adaptation from a few years ago of U.K. author Jeff Noon's award-winning first novel, Vurt, still attracts sporadic comment from kindly folks on the interweb, for which I am eternally grateful.

I got a mail yesterday from an Austrian gentleman whose Serbian housemates had introduced him to my work... What do you do when presented with such love from differing international quarters..?

Draw them a sketch, of course!

I heart the internet sometimes.

If you're someone somewhere interesting in the world and you genuinely like Vurt and my wee comic of it, I might even draw a sketch for you too...

'Move-Find'

Mon, 10 Jul 2006 22:27:36 GMT

A little Art Attack:

Enjoyed daubing this out a lot, also started thinking I really should paint a whole lot more. Even if they are little medium exercises like this. Slopping paint about is fun, garshdarnit.
Realised half-way through it's actually nothing but a repetition of an older motif. What can I say, I'm currently more obsessed than usual with the work of Akihiko Yoshida...

Art Harvest III

Mon, 10 Jul 2006 21:47:02 GMT

Another...

By Sandra Sierra. It's great to have a variety of styles of art coming in.

More Art Harvest!

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 16:00:51 GMT

From the unnecessarily wonderful Mr. Felipe Sobreiro. Cheers, Felipe.

Art Harvest

Sat, 15 Apr 2006 22:10:10 GMT

A fine gentleman by the name of Donal Delay only went and drew us a Contract Blues pinup!

I think this is the first time some characters I've invented and drawn have been interpreted by someone else... And I absolutely love it, I got weak-kneed at the concept alone...

And here's my pinup for him in return! It's of one of his original characters, who is very good at taking care of business (in this case, punching/kicking people in the head), and has a belt buckle to prove it:

If this picture had a speech bubble, It would be, "Now get the fuck out of my garden."

Call for Entries

Sat, 15 Apr 2006 21:57:21 GMT

For Issue #2 of Contract Blues, by myself and Mike Fugere, we're on the lookout for 'pinups' from other artists to beef out the Contempo-Noir Extravaganza. The Deal is this: Draw us a page of black and white artwork with something to do with 'CB'- and I'll draw you one back. How's that..?

If you're interested, there's previews of the interior pages of Issue #1 on here and another one on my site.

And here's a character sheet of the guys who actually have the 'Contract Blues':

Just to make it easier for you... Any takers..? The more varied the art styles are, the better.

(The deadline for this is ~~the end of May, maybe later...)~~ Actually, it's been extended until October or so, because that's when Issue 2's out. Thankyou for your continued patience.

Draw Yourself out of the Country

Fri, 14 Apr 2006 15:20:00 GMT

Little doodle I did for this competition Sony were running, because the prizes were either a two-week trip to South America, or a new PS2 scribbled on by the people who made the PS2 games Shadow of the Colossus and Ico...

If you've got a Playstation 2 lying about somewhere being used only as a doorstop or drinks coaster, I recommend you pick up and play Shadow of Colossus, as it's a nicely unique game, and has games journalists with foam on their chins and trousers round their ankles the world over. Oh, while you're in the games shop, get Gradius V, Metal Slug 3 and a Katamari as well. You know validating the videogames medium makes sense.

Zombie Cowboys on Zombie Horses

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 21:26:02 GMT

Artwork for the the last part of the 24 page 'Dead', the Western with Zombies In, written by Gary Simpson. You can read it from the beginning here.

'Dead' is in the spirit of all the schlock comics you read when you were a kid, where muscles were tensed, guns were big and went BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA, and explosions went KA-WHOOM.

Sheriff Flint pays the price for being a strong female character. At the 'level' I work at, decent female characters just don't seem to exist. It's a shame. 'Flinty' here is the pistol-packing matriarch to a ramshackle town of zombie apocalypse survivors...

Ahh, she's not dead after all, she's come back to life as a righteous zombie in the single most adolescent image I've ever drawn... (The Gatling Gun belongs to the old guy with the googles from earlier on in the story)

Deputy Andy, the older guy with the mop of hair and wee glasses, is modeled by me - in a Euro-comics nerd-attack - as an elderly version of Blueberry. This is the first Western set comic I've drawn, and I couldn't resist paying some kind of homage to a fantastic adventure comic.

What a happy ending!

You can grab this sucker in print in the next issue of Starscape.