And the last (for now, though I’m working on more!) of my Space Pirate sketchbook pages.
To follow: a full page Space Pirate concept design (black and white).
Here’s my next sketch of four space pirates. If they were going to made into miniatures I like to give them alternative heads! There’s a humanoid alien here too.
Boy do I not use this website enough, it needs a right old tidy-up. Anywaaaayy… here’s a page of some sketches from a year or two ago. They’re some ideas I had for that classic SF trope: Space Pirates! I was considering whether to design them as costumes for a film or miniatures for a game.
I incorporated some of the feel of late 1980’s/early 1990’s Citadel Space Pirates by Bob Olley and Bob Naismith (Bob Olley’s Space Pirates Bob Naismith’s Space Pirates) with some traditional piratical gear and other influences like the mercenaries from Riddick (2013), and the Ravagers from Guardians Of The Galaxy(2014) and Vol. 2 (2017). More of these tomorrow!
This is my final batch of 1990’s nostalgia, starting with this lively coloured page of daftness. First we’ve got more tubby jumper wearing middle-aged dude shooting fireballs from his eyes, Odin getting his credit card refused by the smug-faced character, a blue dog with a trumpet and some dip pen ink/Quink experiments on the next page. Vertigo’s House of Secrets’ Rain Harper can be seen at the top right. Rain Harper
More of a scene here though still a sketchy one, a policeman character and a possible scene with onion-head. Dip pen and rapidograph inks, though I think the dip pen is better here.
The next pages are me sketching some deliberately crummy mafia gangsters and some scrappy storyboarding.
More storyboarding on the next page also the debut of Shitefighter 7XA3D.
And the last pages of this sketchbook feature a full colour cartoon in dip pen, coloured inks, Quink and bleach; it’s a fight between Masonic Cop Ninja vs Onion-headed guy.
When I moved house last year I happened upon a box full of student artwork, much of it typical of your graphic design student not wanting to do the projects assigned by his tutors. Anyhow I scanned some of the better stuff in, so I shall share it here. I produced these during and after I went on my Erasmus exchange to Antwerp. I really got into comics there, buying them from the Stripwinkel (Mekanik Strip), these included DC Vertigo’s Hellblazer (art by Sean Philips, the King Arthur plot by Paul Jenkins) Johnny The Homicidal Maniac by Jhonen Vasquez, DC Vertigo’s House of Secrets (written by Steven T Seagle, art by Teddy Kristiansen) and of course Mike Mignola’s Hellboy.
The first couple of pages are cartoon characters I was doodling, including a swearing onion-headed man, a manic shoeless guy, a tubby, slightly sinister, jumper wearing middle aged chap who can shoot plasma balls from his eyes. Also a worried philosopher with a goatee and walking toaster.
Now we have a few more characters evolving from the messy lines: clones with barcodes on their foreheads, a viking, a caricature of a housemate from Plymouth who was into surfing, a scary punk (I avoided such a person once in Plymouth though he didn’t have nails in his head as far as I can remember) and there’s a self- portrait too! On the right page is a huge hulking chap who for no reason I’ve decided reforms his shape like the T1000 in Terminator 2, there’s an almost mask-faced character too along with lots of notes.
Next we have two scraperboard (or scratchboard if you’re from the US or Australia) pages of my manic guy with a hammer, lit by a window and troubled chap at the bottom of some stairs. I quite like the stark, scratchy scraperboard effect, I was considering using it for a whole comic but realised it would be very expensive!
A few more pages of character creation, there’s a dim fellow, possibly based on someone I knew, a one with a hemisphere head with mad eyebrows, a slightly gothy girl with a pet electric eel in a fish tank on wheels. The page of gore probably started as an ink sketch I wanted to obliterate. Rotring technical pen, dip pen and black ink was used for creating the characters on the next pages. The mask-faced chap is more Sci-fi now, I feel a bit sorry the sad clone with his mop and bucket. I’ve drawn one of my housemates of the time saving a cat.
And for the final of this trip back to the late 1990’s; I’ve almost got the hang of the dip pen and I’m using Quink ink to create the grey/turquoise effect and bleach applied with an old paintbrush to get the fleshy colour. There’s all sorts of silly ideas here too. More next time!
These pages are from my sketchbook started in 2013 of various things I was working on. Firstly I have some doodles and notes, some tinkering of my dimensional alchemist’s helmet/mask and an idea I had for a character for my second sunken world adventuring party. He’s an enemy of the Icthyss (fish-men) and their Thulhid overlords and has a fish-man skull, a weapon or two and scaled skin as trophies. The next page has some jolly Space Ork Freebooters as I felt like drawing them and some ideas for a race of smaller humanoids in the Sunken World. There’s also a fish-themed helmet for a sunken world bounty hunter.
Here we have my thief idea and more of the sea ranger/Icthyss hunter and then some ideas for a Thulhid’s experimental mutants and an elite armoured Icthyss.
Space Ork Freebooters are copyright Games Workshop, this is fan art and not intended to annoy GW.
Hello! I’ve realised that I hadn’t posted all of my Spitfyre concepts on this website, so here are a few more of my Spitfyre images I produced late last year and earlier this year. The Gnomes get a giant falcon (roughly the size of a Bloch mb 150) with pennants and helmet painted in the Escadrille (squadron) colour.
For the Dwarves; a vulture bomber that acts dive bombs like the German WWII Junkers 87 Stuka and the massive Kampfkondor 111; a giant condor bomber based on the Heinkel.
I’ve grouped them all on my Miniatures Concepts page under Panzerfäuste. [Miniatures Concepts]
As promised here’s the next character for my Sunken World adventuring party, a thief with concealed daggers, climbing rope, caltrops, throwing knives and reinforced leather armour disguised with the same pattern on the rest of her clothes.
A new wave of Jon Boyce’s science fiction Colony 87 miniatures are on their way, concept drawings by me and sculpts by the excellent miniature sculptors Mike Anderson and John Pickford. Here’s a link to the Facebook page.
Colony 87 on Facebook
The brief from Jon was to draw a “female, deep space pilot wearing flight suit covered with pockets, cabling, tubing etc. Hard-seal connection at neck, calves and forearms. Helmet is removed and under arm in classic pilot pose. Mature, but attractive – think Helen Mirren. One side of head is shaved.”
My process is to created a reference sheet from all sorts of images I’ve collected from the internet and my own books; ranging from space suit designs by Fred Freeman of ex-Nazi rocket scientist Wernher Von Brown’s First Men to the Moon (1960) book, (Retro-future Space Suit) to actual space suits and movie space suits from science fiction films. Then produce a sketch of my initial ideas to send to the client (in this case Jon Boyce).
I’ve finally got round to putting more of my artwork on this website, I’m sorry it’s been so long!
I always have a few projects on the go; here are some more Sunken world images: a Sunken World character I created a couple of years ago; one of those images I needed a little bit of free time to finish off.
She’s a Raktos, (Raktos and Yrdin) a race of horn-headed humanoids who are rumoured to be half-demonic and they do little to dispel that rumour. Many of them do possess magical powers so I drew a couple of flames on her fingertips. She is accompanying the warrior who I posted a while back on my Facebook Page:
I’ve ideas for the rest of this adventuring group which I shall post next time.