Working today on the 20th anniversary edition of a strip I've been drawing since 1987, called The Really Heavy Greatcoat. It's been appearing in a variety of local news media since John Freeman and I thought up the strip during a rather odd night in the Moorlands pub, Lancaster. Neither John nor I have ever been paid for it, although it has led to us getting noticed and getting other, paid, work. We just do it for fun. Anyway, John pointed out that the 20th anniversary is coming up (on the 21st February, it's a good job John keeps track of these things because I tend to forget my own birthday), so we thought we'd better do something to mark the event. So John wrote a two-page special featuring just about every character who ever appeared in the strip. Thanks, John!

I had an odd phone conversation with my sister. I had sent her, at her request, a cartoon of our Dad, who passed away recently. She wanted to know what media I had used. I explained to her that I had used my normal working method of drawing the pencil or ink outline by hand, then scanning it into my computer and colouring in Photoshop. She seemed surprised, she had thought I'd used pencil crayon. I said that's just one of the many custom brushes and pens I've set up in Photoshop, and that I can simulate anything from flat fill-in colour to crayon, watercolour, oils or something like this:

...so what I'd actually sent her was a printout from the computer, which I'd then mounted on card and set in a hand-drawn and hand-coloured frame.

I thought that everybody could tell when I was working in Photoshop, but my sister is an artist and she was completely fooled. Funny.

Monday, February 12, 2007 8:34:50 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0]