Wednesday 9 October 2013

A New Adventure

This is my first post in ages due to my blog getting hacked a few months back. I secured it months ago but I didn't have the desire to come back and start posting stuff, especially since I don't own a computer anymore.

Anyway, at the end of June I stumbled upon a website called Irish Comic News. Ever since I was a young child I wanted to be an artist.  But I specifically wanted to be a comic artist. Here I found a lot of Irish comic creators who create stories and artwork and self publish their own comics to a high standard. Some are contracted to the big publishers Marvel, DC, Image etc. This was was something I saw and immediately thought, "How do I get in on this?"

So after sending a few emails to email addresses on the site, I got a message back from a fella called Darrin O'Toole. He said he'd like to see what I could come up with and sent me a script. He also told me about this big comic convention in Dublin, DICE, which had the cream of the crop as guests when it came to International Comic creators - writers and artists. Dice was happening on the 28th-29th of September. Darrin said that if the art was done by the first week of September, we could potentially have an issue for sale at DICE.

For various reasons, I wasn't able to start the artwork until the first week of July which gave me nearly 4 weeks to get 21 pages of art done. I never did a comic before or had any experience in graphical storytelling and I didn't have the time to go about it as a normal comic artist would, so I decided to make it a lot more abstract than I planned to at first. This was simply to save time. If I had time, I would've taken lots of reference pics, got my friends into certain action poses and photographed them so I could see what the human body looks like at different angles. Each page would be more sequential art instead of the abstract single pages like it ended up. But I'll do that for the next batch of issues.

I got there in the end and it was a great educational experience. The lack of time definitely didn't make it fun but it made me work hard under pressure and it got me out of my comfort zone. It gave me a chance to try out new stuff and go completely experimental. The result is something you'll either love or hate. The issue got done and we sold it DICE.

DICE was great fun. I met a load of lads and girls I knew already online and it was great to meet in person, especially Darrin  O'Toole who was my first contact in this community. It was like a strange internet/speed dating type of experience. "Whats the story!! I know you from the internet!"

I included a few pics of the artwork below, let me know what you think. I have no pics from DICE though as I left my camera at home.

For those interested, you can buy the book  here.