New O'Messy Life single pt.2

Had some people ask me over the last couple of years how I colour on Photoshop, so here goes.

1) Scan in at 1200dpi
2) Open in PS and use Image > Adjustments > Threshold tool
3) Reduce image size to 300dpi
4) Go to Channels tab and make a copy of the "Blue" channel
5) Go to Image > Adjustments > Invert
6) Use the "marching ants" tool to select the inks
7) Create a new layer
8) Paint bucket black into the selected area
9) Clear the background layer
10) Create a layer between the background and the inks to colour on

This is my tried and tested method, and exactly what I did for the O'Messy Life cover. I use a Wacom tablet and a whole bunch of Polygon lasso tool when colouring on that intermediate layer and it's a much messier business than it appears when you remove the inks layer from above:

In many ways, however, it actually looks much softer and easier on the eye than when my clumsy line work is slapped over it. Never the less, this is the finished product! More when I start work on the back cover.

New O'Messy Life single pt.1

Hello all,

I have a big news dump on the way, but for now here's what I'm tinkering with at the moment. I heard some rough mixes of some great new songs by O'Messy Life, that they'll be releasing on Tiny Lights pretty soon. This time, the external platform they've chosen to use for these deeply internal songs is the space shuttle Challenger disaster of 1986. I'm once again privileged to be asked to design the artwork for this release. Number one fan boy, right here.

Lead singer David Littlefair had some pretty specific ideas in mind to begin with, but I meddled with them a little bit and with our powers combined we've came up with what I think will be a really neat design. It's been a much more involved conceptual process this time around, and we've drawn from this amalgam of reference material to come up with the image.

 Stock photo found online.

 Incredible illustration by Rebecca Mock.

 Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Hans Bol.

 Photo of Challenger explosion found on the internet.

While the tragedy was worldwide and almost other-worldly in scale and coverage, we wanted to get at the sense of loss on a personal, domestic level. The obvious reason for this was that musically, the band are exploring personal ideas, using the disaster as a parallel/metaphorical narrative throughout. Here are some design process shots:

 I made a very faded printout of this photo, drew directly over it in black fineliner, changing the proportions of various parts of the room and disregarding some features.

 Then I used a light box and a new sheet of paper to pencil over the basic lines I had made on the printout and filled in the extra details as I went along. 

 I did have my heart set on the head-in-hands gesture, which I based on this, but it turned out local band Withered Hand, and friend of O'Messy Life, had a similar looking design.

This is just one little detail I knew I'd need to tidy up in Photoshop. Yep, it's drool.

 

I then scanned in the inks and I'm currently in the process of colouring. I'll post more as I go along, but for now, here's the nice, poppin'-fresh black on white design:

 

 

Thought Bubble 2012

With Thought Bubble only a week away, I thought I'd share some news/plans with everyone. Firstly, if you're not planning on going to Thought Bubble - GO! It really is the finest convention the UK has to offer. Just the right kind of focus for anybody's tastes, just the right kind of atmosphere to make creators, guests and families feel welcome. This will be my fourth time exhibiting and I'm more excited about it than ever before!

I'll be sharing table 169 in New Dock Hall with P M Buchan, who I've been collaborating with for 8 years, since the first issue of our and Phil Marsden's collaborative anthology Blackout. They were humble beginnings, and we've periodically released 3 more issues since that first one, as well as completing a slew of other strips that Bucky has written and I have drawn, which have featured in, among other places, Starburst and SCREAM magazines. Meanwhile, Marsden has surpassed even himself, managing to weasel his way into illustrating for NME and Kerrang! magazines.

But none these accomplishments even remotely resemble the magnificence of our latest effort, which also features work by the incredible Andrew Waugh, some splendid colour and design work by Michael Barnes, and a guest strip and pin-up by Harley Poe's Joe Whiteford... ladies and gentlemen, I give you Blackout #5. In fact, so much does it eclipse the other issues that we've done away with the issue number and simply christened it BLACKOUT. It is a completely stand-alone, monolithic behemoth of pain, filth and gore. Within its confines, I have a silent, four-page strip entitled "Wages of Sin", written by Buchan, coloured by Barnes, and a seven-page romantic tragedy soaked in blood, affectionately named "What's Inside A Girl?" after the mini-comic of the same title that Bucky produced some 6 years ago. I was also roped into doing the cover, much like the first time we ever put an issue of Blackout together.... typical!







Bucky will also be releasing issue one of his Gothic-horror series La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and has work featured in the anthology Disconnected vol. 2 - read more about these delights on his website. As for moi, I'm disappointed to say no new issue of The Big Bang this year, as it's been all kinds of busy. But I do plan on putting out a beastly issue (if not a concluding issue) next year to make up for it. I will be doing some super sweet deals on comics and prints though:

The Big Bang Issues One, Two and Three - £6.00
John Henry Split My Heart - £2.50
The Gentleman Ghost - £1.50
Costume Party - £2.00
One print - £5.00
Two prints - £9.00
Three prints - £12.00
And I will be offering my customary "Anything you Like" A4 b/w commissions for £5.00 too!

The price of Blackout is yet to be announced, but you're looking at about £3.00 for 32 full-colour pages, on sexy uncoated stock - the only comic that come with a 100% guarantee that all contributors are going straight to hell! Blood sacrifices, hearts of virgins and other offers may be accepted.

Bath Tub

Something worth sharing with you.


Two Slides
Don't loose me again
Golden Mirror
Catch me from behind don't forget my hands
Yarney Veins
Search across the wooden floor tonight
Wide white walls
Whisper wrong directions
We sleep separately for protection
Wide white sheets
Holding everything in the morning
We hold everything in the morning
Wet wool by the window in the morning
Wet skin steeped in snow by the morning
Two A.M. and the bath waters still running

Loads'a Stuff!

As usual, I've been so busy actually doing stuff that I haven't had much of a chance to post about it on here. As I have a rare window of opportunity today on account of my school being closed and having no lessons to teach, I thought I'd share everything that has happened since last time.

Classroom

I have one! It's fun! I created a little reward system/game/poster thing to go on my wall, called "Quest for the Golden Skull" - the kids earn points for being awesome in various ways through the week, then on Friday they use their points and the spinner to pass through the castles and use their minds (which I have moulded) to answer questions posed by the various villains along their path to victory. The winning team gets comfy cushions the next week, sweets and first dibs on using the Creation Station. That's a little area I set up with a red octopus called Francois, who holds challenge envelopes in his hands that are worth points if completed in the Words Book, Pictures Book or Scrapbook. Behold!

New Rob Heron Cover
After the success of the last cover, I had the pleasure of working with Rob Heron & The Teapad Orchestra again. This time was a little draining on the band and on myself, because my iMac is on its last legs and finding Photoshop to be a very tricky customer. But we're both happy with how the artwork turned out and what I've heard of the album also sounds swell. You can find out more about the release and where to pick up a copy on the band's website.

O-Messy Life T-Shirt
I had loads of fun drawing this scene of gore and death - took me right back to childhood! I also managed to side-step having to do anything on Photoshop, which helped with the turn around and my sanity. It's an even nicer commission because it marks the triumphant return of the band after an injury-related hiatus. More gigs and releases soon I hope! The t-shirts are available from the Tiny Lights website.

Lemons
As almost a cheesy motivational poster for my classroom, and something fun to do over the summer, I created this little illustration. I'll probably be putting it in my Etsy shop soon, and I'll have copies for sale at Thought Bubble this year.

Starburst
How I've never picked up a copy of this magazine before I have no idea; it's brimming with reviews for movies, TV shows, books, comics, videogames, table-top games and basically all of the stuff I live and breathe. BONUS! Now that Bucky is on their writing team, we have a comic in the current issue (read more about that here) and I also get a mention for my series The Big Bang in his column Adventures on Alternative Earths. Go to any good stockist and pick up a copy!

Blackout
The crude A5, black and white, hand-folded and -stapled overly offensive rag of death, alcoholism and rage that saw me through my self-publishing fetish as a teen is back with a vengeance! This time, in addition to the 'original three' contributors: myself, PM Buchan and Phil Marsden, we are also welcoming to the fold the immeasurably talented beard of Andy Waugh, who will be offering some original work of his own creation, AND the miniature making, miniature painting, comics writing, comics drawing Michael Barnes, who will be colouring some of mine and Phil Marsden's work.

What's that? Colour you say? You better believe it! This is going to be like no other Blackout you've read before. In fact, so redundant does it make all of the other issues, that we're simply giving it the monolithic title of 'Blackout' and doing away with issue numbers! It will be full colour, much lengthier than the other issues and more succinctly offensive and filth-ridden. Here are a few sneaky peeks of my progress so far.

Twitter
Okay, I swore to myself that I would never submit. As a devout technophobe and hater of all social networking websites, apps and other nonsense, Twitter seemed about the stupidest thing of all. HOWEVER, when I found out that the game designers I turned onto my dice game Teltos at a recent stag party were creating wonderful ripples in the gaming world, going so far as to create Teltos arenas, custom dice bags and a slew of new and hilarious gaming names, I had to be a part of it. Nay, I had to stake my claim! Plant my flag! And now that I'm on, I'll occasionally post an update about arty progress or gaming stuff. Follow me @Teltos.

School's Out for Summer

Greetings all. Well, I'm now officially a qualified teacher and have an exciting September ahead of me. Until then, I also have a little more time to devote to drawing and stuff, so I thought I'd kick off with some old stuff that I didn't have the chance to post up here while I was in school etc.

First off, here's the cover artwork for the second Tiny Lights release from O'Messy Life. It's a reference to the Heaven's Gate Cult and originally had a different back cover featuring the head of their ultra-creepy cult leader Mark Applewhite.

Here's the unused Applewhite head:

I also had the tremendous pleasure of being placed at Benton Park Primary School for 8 weeks at the end of my course, and I got to know an absolutely lovely and utterly bonkers group of kids whose teacher acted as my mentor while I was there. Every morning they would tell me about the bizarre dreams they had the night before about being eaten by various food stuffs, mostly fruit. As a parting gift I made this illustration for them:

Finally, a bit of fan art for Mountain Man. Go lisssen.

Threadless Submission - PLEASE VOTE!

I have decided, after years of fandom, patronage and purchases from the splendid t-shirt website Threadless, to submit my own design and see how it does. Check out this re-vamped toaster bot, and if you'd like it hanging around your excellent physique, GO VOTE FOR IT! It would look awesome on you, and I'm not just saying that.


If it's successful I'll pick a bunch of you bloggers to get a free tee - just comment below to say you've voted! Thank you in advance for your support!

Since Last We Spoke

Hello! I've just broken up for Easter so I'm hoping to get organised on both the comics and becoming-a-teacher front over the next two weeks. I made a few tweaks to the main website, as I'm now teaching kids who know both of my names and are curious about googling me - there's a kids and grown-ups option when you hit the home page now, with ruder bits contained only in the latter.

Here's a few news items that might take your fancy:

1) There's an audio interview with me at the Canny Comic Con
2) I have illustrated THREE album covers I've managed not to post about before
3) I've created a tabletop RPG for Primary School-aged children

Interview at the CCC
Even though the event has been and gone, I recommend you visit the Canny Comic Con website so you can hear about how amazingly well the whole thing went. There's a nifty list of all the press it got - photos, reviews, blog entries and the likes. Among this selection of tasty treats are a few audio interviews with some really cool people, plus me. My girlfriend pointed out to me that I keep interrupting and sound like a jerk - I prefer to think of it as enthusiasm! The direct link is here.

THREE Album Covers
The first I really should have put up ages ago. This was commissioned by Rob Heron and the Teapad Orchestra for their EP "Teepy Eepy". Go check them out here.


The other two are the fourth and fifth covers I've produced for O'Messy Life, this time for a couple of singles - "Escape Velocity" and "Little Vehicles/Space Holiday". Both of these bad boys are being put out by Tiny Lights, the first is available now, the second later this month. I'll post the cover for that one when it's all confirmed and the artwork is finalised.


Tabletop RPG for Kids
Among the other tasty nuggets of newness you can find on my main website, there is a link on the Workshops page for a free download of all the materials you need to play Forging Fables.


This is a game I play-tested with some Year 6s as an after-school club while I was on teaching placement and it went splendidly. It's not vastly different from a lot of other RPG gaming systems, but it's sleek enough to appeal to younger kids without bewildering them with tomes of stats and rules. Try it out with some youngsters and tell me how it went!

More soon...ish. Maybe.

What's the What, World Wide Web?

Here's an uber-fast rundown of everything I've been up to since the last post:

1) A Christmas Special for Scream magazine with collaborator PM Buchan, of course
2) A meal and sip of scotch whisky with Anders Nilsen, don'tchuknow
3) A new issue of the Big Bang (available here)
4) A nice weekend at Thought Bubble comic con
5) A new print in the Etsy Store
6) A talk and stall lined up for tomorrow's Canny Comic Con

And here's a little bit of an expansion on these news items:

A Christmas Special for Scream Magazine

The third and, alas, final for now, submission to Scream Magazine that PM Buchan and I will be submitting, but what a corker. It's about the legend of Krampus in the modern age and is a gloriously blood-soaked festive treat. We're selling the three strips we've submitted as a limited numbered set, so if you run into either me or Bucky out and about in the comic world (or if you check my Etsy shop after this weekend) you'll be able to score yourself a copy for a mere £2 English. Here's a sneaky peak:


A Meal and a Sip of Scotch Whisky with Anders Nilsen

Due to being at a wedding, I wasn't able to make it to the recent Anders Nilsen signing for Big Questions at Travelling Man. But although I don't work there anymore, I still invivte myself to all of their social events. So naturally, when I found out they were wining and dining him the night before, I gatecrashed. I also brought with me an arsenal of comics that I knew he'd want to see by Angus McKie in a vain attempt to get a mention on his blog. And guess what, you guys? I (sort of) did! Here's some grainy photos of Anders looking uncomfortable and me looking happier than I've ever been in my sad little life, plus the awesome sketch he did for me:


The Big Bang Issue Three - A Comic for Dennis Brown (+ New Print)

Please welcome to the fold Issue Three of The Big Bang series. This issue is a mini comic, featuring 12 pages of delicious greyscale story all about the life of Dennis Brown, the bus driver who makes his first appearance at the beginning of The Big Bang Issue Two. The subheading is a reference to the song “A Song for Dennis Brown” by The Mountain Goats.

While this issue doesn't carry on from the previous one, it offers extra depth to the character and should enhance your reading of the issues yet to come. On the other hand, it can also work as a standalone story without any need to have read issues one and two. The story is broken up into three parts – Dennis’ childhood, his early adulthood and his midlife career choice to drive buses.

Go buy it! And while you're there, buy this too:


A Nice Weekend at Thought Bubble

It was a nice weekend, and too nice to possibly go into all of the details with the limited time I have. Great catching up with folks I don't get to catch up with otherwise, nice being at the mercy of Joe Public during my (now customary) "Draw Anything You Want For £5" social experiment and I also had the chance to make my peace for not bowing down in servitude to the wonderously talented Kristyna Baczynski the last couple of times I unwittingly spoke to her at the con.

Talk and Stall at Canny Comic Con


It's probably a bit late in the day to be informing you of this now, but my co-conspiritor on The Big Bang has organised an incredible schedule of talks, workshops, panels and seminars to take place in a hall full of comic stalls at Newcastle City Library tomorrow (10th December!) - in other words, he's finally filled the gap between Leeds and Inverness that the comic-convention-going people of the North needed! I'll be doing a 30minute talk starting at 10am called "What Comics Aren't" and I'll also be selling my wares all the live long day. Go to the CCC website and brace yourself to be punched in the face with awesome.

Hey You Guys

I'm not going to give my usual apology for irregular updates or any empty promises to stay on top of things like usual. This is for two reasons: 1) I always say those things and never follow through, and 2) I'm going to have even less opportunity than before to do regular updates between now and June 2012 because I've just started a Primary PGCE and Hoo-Boy, is it going to be intense.

Instead, here's a massive information dump to read at your leisure. If anyone out there still follows my work, they may have noticed a big change to my main website. You might notice it isn't as fancy pants, but has been streamlined into a sleek little set of pages that a HTML dunce like me can manage without help from computer geniuses. That means more regular updates, more frequent page errors and generally more STUFF. What's more, you can view this blog as part of the site, so why not bookmark it? Why not, huh?

You may also remember me talking about some collaboration with the heathen known as Phillip M Buchan. Well, aside from the four page strip mentioned before, I've also done two one-pagers with Bucky that have landed in the sweet UK horror magazine Scream. One is about the grim reaper and being a drunk, and the other is about a teenage werewolf and being drunk. Thematic stuff, previews of which can be seen below.

I've also been chipping away at the third issue of The Big Bang and make a solemn promise to have printed versions at this year's Thought Bubble. Finally, I just finished designing a poster/flyer design for the forthcoming Jeffrey Lewis gig here in Newcastle. I was a little pushed for time, but skimped on no details when it came to drawing the guitar composed 90% of stickers, for which Jeff is so famously known (to creeps like me). Behold!


In other news, my good ol' buddy bud Andy Waugh has just launched a website, and I know for a fact that our two websites bookmarked side by side on your browser will be an incredible and beautiful sight to behold.

Demonville

Paul Regan, writer and co-creator of the immensely popular small press comic book series Trenchfoot and vice chairman of OG Comics Enterprises has written a novel. Although it has a few stages left before it's unleashed on the general public, Mr. Regan asked me to produce a cover for this bold leap into the non-panel-based literary arts. And here, according to his original doodle, is the finished piece:

What's Up?

Whatever small percentage of this blog's readership that still remains may be wondering why I haven't posted recently (or regularly) on here in a while and in explaining that reason, I'm also going to be producing one big post of updates to make up for it!

Make Do & Mend Fair
My last post was giving people the heads up about the recent craft fair at Heaton Perk and, as anticipated, it was jolly good fun. I met lots of nice people, including Katie Chappell, who as well as working in Newcastle's (and indeed the world's!) finest cosmetics shop Lush, is also apparently a really good artist! Sally was dishing out plenty of Tunnocks goodies to stall owners and visitors alike, and even snapped this silly and rather horrendous picture of me endorsing the procedure.


A Bit Crack and Chris Bostock's Starlight
The infinitely talented traditional storytellers of A Bit Crack, a group who perform on the first Friday of every month at the Star and Shadow Cinema in Newcastle, hired me to re-vamp their promotional material. This was a long collaboration but we all came out of it happy with the results I think! Following that I was then hired by the group's own Chris Bostock to put together some promotional material for his younger years performance "Starlight"

Below are some of the mock-ups I designed:

This design made use of one of the main props from the show but we agreed the colours weren't quite right for a younger years show and decided to incorporate the characters from the story into the design.

This is one of a series of very small (10cm x 15cm, I think) ink drawings of various compositions that I scanned into Photoshop to play around with more pastel-ly colours. Once I found a colour scheme I was happy with, I tried to stick with the same pallette.

It was a conscious decision on Chris' part not to show too much of the faces of the characters as the show is geared by the young people's imagination and he didn't want to ascribe too much detail. Chris was happiest with the original sky-gazing mock-up so I worked on a bigger, tidier version with clearer text and ended up with this:

This acts as the cover to an A5 booklet with show details and contact information and I referred back to some of these original mock-ups when designing the interior pages too.

Workshops Galore!
Jack & Daniel's Comic Book Workshops had their busiest month to date in May and in addition to all of the projects we lead during that time, we've also been working on getting an anthology of work together by a group we spent 12 lunchtime sessions with at Holystone Primary School near Northumberland Park. There's a touch of scanning left to do and I'm going to design a cover similar to our Seven Stories anthology, which will feature my renderings of the kids' characters - I can't wait! I'll post the finished piece when it's done.

Window Murals
This is a slight aside, but a strange creative endeavour I've recently undertaken so it might be of interest! Travelling Man, the aforementioned comic shop where I work, have actually encouraged its more creative hoodlums to paint stuff onto the shop window to promote our events! My first attempt was a straight-up robot to promote Free Comic Book Day:

Following that we had a signing with Richard Starkings and Doug Braithwaite to promote their forthcoming collaboration on Richard's series Elephantmen. First off, I set about getting the information on the window before it started to rain one day. This was supposed to read as "Elephantmen signing 21st May with Richard Starkings and Doug Braithwaite"


I took a photo of it, pondered it for a couple of days until I was back at work and decided that it didn't read right and probably needed a "This Saturday" because your average Joe doesn't conjure up the day based on "21st". I took quite a bit of care with the lettering knowing what a connoseur Mr Starking's is, and once I was happy with the tweaks I got to work painting a big scary elephant head.


And here's the finished thing in all of its temporary, wash-off glory:


As mentioned before, Travelling Man is going to be having a slew of awesome celebratory events for its 20th birthday soon, and I just found a chunky Posca pen in my collection so I'm very excited to get busy with that for the next mural. If you scroll back a bit you'll see the robot design I created for posters/t-shirts/flyers for the celebration, and when the flyers landed in the shop I was very excited to see that on the reverse side was Becky Cloonan's awwwesome design for this year's Thought Bubble comic convention. Which brings me nicely to the next point of business!

Thought Bubble S.O.S.
I will be stalling it out at both days of this years new and improved mega convention in Leeds, selling wares, meeting the good people of pen and ink and running a workshop on the Sunday. I'd like to make a call-out for anyone who might be so kind as to hop on my stall every now and then so I can eat, use the bathroom and more crucially, run a workshop on Sunday.

Here's Becky's design. I know, awwwesome.

My table is a well-oiled machine now and you won't be expected to drive the hard bargain or to know anything about my work so long as you are willing to smite those who aim to steal things from me with your mighty fists! If you think you can help out please get in touch: jack@jackfallows.com

If you've got a comic you wanna sell but no stall I'll probably have room for one or two titles so I'd be happy to sell it for you in exchange for your help.

Big Bang Issue Three
It exists in corporeal form now! After much set-back, deliberation and redrafting of scripts, it has four pages to call its own and a final script as well as thumbnails for every page. What's even more exciting is that I'm working on 1/4 of the size I usually would so I'm going to blaze through it. Why 1/4 size? Well, The Big Bang Issue Three is going to be a stand-alone A6 mini comic, which will delve into the biography of one of the story's characters. The aim is that it can be sold out of sequence with the main storyline, but that it will enrich the reading of the main storyline for those completists among you. This was the scene a couple of nights ago:

Commander and Chief Lua the cat observes my progress.

More updates to follow soon... possibly!