LIVERPOOL MUSEUM COMIC STRIP!!!

Hey guys! Happy New Year to you all!

Righty, this first post of 2012 is one that I really should have done MONTHS ago, but I've just been caught up in deadline after deadline, that I just haven't found the time.

Good mate of mine, artist John Higgins, recommended me to Paul Gallagher (no relation and bloody nice bloke!), the Curator of Contemporary Collecting at The Museum of Liverpool. The job was to create a massive comic strip depicting the most famous local heroes of Liverpool and Everton football over the years, and the strip would be on display at the new museum in "The Wondrous Place" exhibition.

It was great fun planning this with Paul and designer Rob Harris (more on him later). Paul himself wrote a wonderful little tale of a Grandad and Granddaughter walking through Liverpool's Stanley Park and coming across a football game about to begin. Very soon, the two realise that the players are actually the "ghosts" of our most famous local heroes coming together for one special football game.

Here's the rough layout that I designed after reading his script. Bare in mind that the final image would be blown up to roughly 3 metres x 3 metres....

My original plan was to draw the whole thing on one piece of A1 board, but soon gave myself a big (manly) slap when I realised that there was NO CHANCE I could fit that many footballers into that space. So I had no option but to draw each panel individually on A3 and A4 pages, then forward the coloured files to designer Rob Harris of Haley Sharpe Design, who arranged the panels onto the layout template and lettered the whole strip from Paul's script. Haley Sharpe by the way, were the Lead Exhibition Design Consultants for the museum, and an incredible job they did too!

Here's some random pre-lettered panels.

I was very honoured and proud to be invited to the new museum opening in July with Niki and my dad. It was WAY fancier than the usual events I go to (I had to wear SHOES!) and the building itself on the waterfront is a beautiful piece of architecture. Here's a few photos of our football strip in all it's glory up on the wall:

So thanks once again to John, Paul and Rob. I'm genuinely proud to be part of such a project in my home city, so please be sure to check it out whenever you're in town!

L