MAKING OF 2000AD'S PROG 1770 COVER!!!

Hey guys!

Had a nice start to the weekend by having my comp copies of 2000AD prog 1770 turn up in my mail, featuring my Judge Dredd cover! It's out in British stores this coming Wednesday!

So how, I hear you ask, did you create such a CROTCH-TASTIC cover?! WELL READ ON!!!!

So The Mighty Tharg summoned me into his sacred chambers, ushering out his six breasted love slaves from the planet...um...Sixbreasticals...and ordered me to illustrate a cover depicting Dredd leading a charge of parachuting Judge soldiers from the sky using the designs I created in the recent "Assassination list"  run with John Wagner.

Here's the two rough designs I ran by him. For once I honestly couldn't decide which one I preferred personally.

And so the boss went with my first design. I'm going to spare you the reference photos I took-- was having a bad hair day and there was actually a massive hole in the crotch of my comfy pants. So here's the pencils...

Then we have the inked version...

It was only at this point that I realised how blatant all the "crotch shots" were. I can only apologise, but it was too late to do anything about it by this point.

And so, onto colouring. I'm very grateful to Tharg that he allows me to colour my own covers. Helps me scratch that itch that I need and gives me complete control of how my final artwork appears. Anyway, here's the "flats" first (which I always hate as it's a long, tedious process)...

But once that's out the way, it's the fun stuff like shading, which really brings it to life. I played with just having a white background at first....

I felt it was still missing something so added the orange sky, faded out the troops in the background, and being so impressed with my AQUILA colourist Dylan Teague's use of textures, added my own as well. Here's the finished image...

Close up detail...

And just to confirm to myself that it would work as a cover, here's a mock up I did....

But obviously the design bots at 2000AD did a way better job than I, which you can see on the shelves from Wednesday, featuring an awesome interior Dredd story this time drawn by Ben Willsher and coloured by Chris Blythe.

FINALLY, I should add that THE DAY AFTER I finished this cover, I came across this great 2000AD cover from July 2000, painted by the comic book legend Jock. Not only is it embarrassingly similar in pose, but a week earlier I'd been tweeting him about a 2000AD cover I was working on, and how it's hard to come up with anything as cool as any of his classic covers......sigh....

Ok, I'm done. Now SHOO!

L