About Me
My love for science fiction, comics and comic book art began as a six year old kid in 1977 when my parents took me see Star Wars at the Dome cinema in Worthing. I was awe-struck by the spaceships, robots, space battles, and lightsaber duels. That 2 hours of cinema ignited a love of science fiction that has stayed with me ever since.
Later that same year, I discovered Starlord & 2000AD comics. As a young kid I was hooked on the art and the adventure, but far too young to truly understand the gritty, futuristic world of Judge Dredd, the dark humor of Strontium Dog, and the surreal stories of Nemesis the Warlock that I began to fully appreciate in my teenage years.
I drew my first two pieces of comic inspired art 10 years later in 1987 – a Judge Dredd biro sketch I drew purely for fun, and a copy of a dinosaur from the cover of an issue of 2000AD, that I used as a reference drawing for my Art O level exam (I scraped a C grade that year).
I carried on reading and collecting comics and graphic novels and producing drawings into my mid-twenties, my taste in comics changing – I stopped collecting 2000AD and moved on to grittier, darker and more violent and cerebral material, mainly in the form of collected stories in graphic novels such as The Dark Knight, Give Me Liberty, and The Killing Joke.
As life got busier (work commitments, kids, lots of serious stuff), I stopped collecting comics and drawing comic art in 1994, and for 25 years, my love of comics and comic art lay dormant.
It wasn’t until late 2019 that I had a sudden urge to pick up a pencil and start drawing again, sparked by a 2000AD art appreciation group I am a member of on Facebook. The Coronavirus pandemic lockdown that followed a few months later in early 2020 provided me with ample free time to pursue this hobby again, and I have continued it in my spare time since.
Despite the quarter-century break in sketching, my passion for comic book art has never faded, and whether it’s a trip to a galaxy far, far away or a battle in the streets of Mega City One, I’m loving creating comic art once again.
In terms of technique, I’m definitely old-school. I draw everything freehand on paper, normally starting with a pencil or cyan fine-tipped pens, and then add line work and detail with a variety of black liners and markers. Sometimes I will leave the original sketches untouched, but most often they are scanned into Photoshop where the blacks are saturated, mistakes removed or corrected, and colours added if needed and occasionally filters are added to change the drawing’s appearance (normally if I am unhappy with the original).