Chika

Yesterday I introduced you to a project that was not only the catalyst but also a huge influence on the look of Cloud 109. As I've already mentioned when I had the pleasure of illustrating two series of David Orme's brilliantly wacky Boffin Boy books it helped establish a stylistic leitmotif which I knew I wanted to carry forward into a full scale graphic novel.

There was a comparatively minor character named Chika who was BB's occasional oriental accomplice and Ninja par excellence. Her first appearance was me playing very safe and her costume was relatively restrained, but by the time of the second series I thought well let's just see what I can get away with and clad her in a skin tight black PVC thingy with vampiric batwing collar and my wonderful and very hands off publisher Ransom Books amazingly let it go through.

By the time I was working on Cloud 109 some two years later, I was determined that this would be the look I'd create for Gina.

The Roots of Cloud 109

The catalyst for David Orme and I collaborating on Cloud 109 was a totally wacky but very engaging series of picture books centred around a dweeby hyper-inventive little nerd called Boffin Boy and his mentor a runty oriental ninja wizard sidekick called Wu-Pee.

Here's a couple of samples from some of the stories.

Cloud 109 The Story Unfolds ...

It is my intention that this blog should serve both as a vehicle for presenting the unfolding story of Cloud 109 as well as giving readers an insight into the creative process that underpins much of the work that David Orme and I are so engaged in.

I've given a fair amount of thought as to the best way that this can be achieved and I think the idea of presenting a page a week of the story in sequential order, with other days of the week being devoted to more of the creative process is, at least at the moment the logical way for me to proceed with this exercise.

So here's page 2 of the story with page 1 again, to help maintain the flow.

View From The Studio

Well it's Wednesday morning and having just spent the previous evening with my wife Gina hooking up with our son Tom and his lovely girlfriend Sheryl over in Brighton, which has got to be one of the best places to chill ever, I'm slightly fuzzed and trying to catch up with myself, hence the relative lateness of this posting.

However there's work to be done, alterations to some illustrations as the client has now changed their mind about what they want but at least they're going to pay as (and this is important for anyone embarking on a career in illustration) when a client changes a brief it's only fair and professional to all parties concerned that you as illustrator should be re-imbursed for the work involved.

And then after that there's page 9 of Cloud 109 to be worked up from pencils and then we'll have fifteen consecutive pages plus a few more pages from later in the story completed. Essentially a third of the way through the first book.

In the meantime here's a view of my work space as I set to for the day. You can see a page I've just scanned up on the screen of my beautiful IMac (love it!!!) and there's a page from this seriously wacky sequence where Cary, Gina and Rabby have to engage in a very perilous Dungeon Quest to win credits for themselves, you can just see these two very "other" jailer types on the screen and on my desk in the foreground you can see some copies of our Cloud 109 proposal.

OK that's it for today, gotta get back to work but thanks for checking in.

Work in Progress Part 4

Finished!!! As I'm typing this I'm listening to Sweet Jane on MySpace, if you're wondering where all the rock bands with attitude have gone - well the good news is they're still here - it's just that you've got to dig a little deeper to find them. If you're into the Velvet Underground, The Doors, early Iggy and the Stooges (when they were still pushing the boundaries), The Brian Jonestown Massacre, and music with some balls instead of the pap that we're constantly fed by the system then check them out - they're where real music went when the rest of the world tuned into X Factor.

I'm really feeling that The Cloud 109 cyber lounge is finally beginning to look as it should, there'll be a few readers of this blog that will be able to spot themselves amongst the constantly shifting cavalcade of the beautiful and the damned - hope I haven't taken too many liberties!

Work in Progress Part 3

So, where were we? Right our page is being worked up in Illustrator, which I will admit I used to regard as one of the slowest and most anal ways of creating artwork, conceivable - how wrong I was. It's actually a real delight to use and is easily adaptable as all the vectors and shapes are always manipulable, which for this kind of project where I'm frequently having to go back and rework earlier pages for reasons of continuity is a real joy.

So we start to add in colours as well as adding more figures to the background of the Cloud 109 cyberlounge. With the figures in the lounge, I originally was creating them with the big eyed Manga look I'd given Gina, Cary and Rabby but it just was'nt looking right, they were too distracting and coming up with workable designs was just getting too time consuming. So I lit on the idea of trawling through various friends Facebook/MySpace albums to create an ever shifting mass of cool young bohos to waft their way through the cybernetic Babylon of the Cloud 109 lounge. This has worked really well and I do endeavour to flag up to various interested parties when they're about to make an appearance but it makes the whole creative process for me at least, much more alive, these little characters in the background really do have lives beyond their 2D incarnations.

Work in Progress Part 2

OK so I've scribbled out the page very roughly with a stubby red pencil, scanned it into the computer and the next stage is to open up illustrator and start bunging in the lines and (crucially) deciding where David Orme's peerless prose and distinctively dynamic dialogue is a gonna go. This avoids the scenario of covering up crucial areas of the artwork with speech balloons and captions, which tends to happen if you don't get this sorted out upfront.