Cheers! Time for Craft-Beers!

New in Time Out - Whats your craft-beer tipple? Any similarity to living people with beards is entirely coincidental, but great to hear about!

Digital ink and colour.

Thanks to Anamaria Stanley.

Weir the Warlock

Brace yourself for my latest cover for Fortean Times - out now!

Your London Property Love Match!

Its great to be back in the pages of Time Out. This time its finding your London property love match!

Full figures with expressive poses. Drawn and coloured digitally.

Big thanks to Anamaria Stanley.

Comic Art Workshop

As part of the recent Epic Adventures season at The Horsebridge, I dipped my toe in the water of teaching. My workshop was on comic art, and 19 of Whitstable's talented under 18 year olds came along. They didn't need much help - I just offered a few suggestions and stepped back. Their resulting work was fantastic, and I feel very proud of them.

The students picked an excerpt from a classic story (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Dracula, Life of Pi, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland), and their task was to create a short comic strip based on the text of one of these epic adventures. 

The process was to sketch out the thumbnails, thinking about "camera angles", establishing shots, narrative pacing, how to portray drama, and action. Then work on the tighter pencils, and onto doing the inks. I tried to keep it open to allow their own ideas to come to the fore.

I used "Wally Wood's 22 panels that always work" (see below) to show how the framing of a scene can be used to communicate what the story needs. I love this side of comic art. Its very much like storyboarding for TV and film, and essential to telling a story.

It was a wonderful experience to witness the students bring these stories alive on the page in their own individual ways. I hope they were inspired and continue to do brilliant art in the future.

Heres a photo of some of the finished pieces:

And heres Wally Wood's 22 panels that always work:

Portrait Commissions

In the frosty approach to Christmas I'm accepting portrait commissions. For examples, sizes, and prices look here.

Shark With A Pearl Earring

Garden

Back in the 90's everyone was going on about pickled sharks and sensations, I was in a garage painting 6ft sq paintings like these.