This'd Be Me, Then

[Wayne R.]

Let's see if I can claw back to where I was in my late teens, and go a bit further this time.
Back then, it was comics. All I wanted in life was a job at 2000AD, where Bisley had just started teaching a whole generation of artists how to draw and paint, and Zenith was still being the best thing to ever grace its pages.
It didn't happen, and I got real jobs instead.
So here's some old stuff. I'll be dropping newer things in here so that I -and anyone else who wants to look- can see how I''m getting on.
Due to my aims in life, there'll be copyrighted characters that I've drawn, and if it's a problem then the mods can always take them down.

The first is of Slaine. I loved the Fabry version, thought Bisley's was a bit musclebound but still brilliant. Wondered how I'd draw him if I had the chance.

Second and third are all I have left of a strip called Crepuscule, which I was drawing for Dave Slade (whoops, I think I dropped something!) back in the late 80s. Back then, I knew him as the guy who'd been a BMX pro for Dyno/GT. Maybe he still has the originals, I don't foresee getting to ask him anytime soon. Nowadays he's directing movies like Hard Candy and 30 Days of Night.
The Cupid/Demon was done in what must've been a particularly jaded period. I drew and painted it whilst sitting in small huts guarding wasteland around the Royal Albert Docks. When I said 'real jobs', I meant the type that pay regularly. Not the rewarding type with prospects and a future.

More to come, I just ran out of time.

[Wayne R.]

Recently, I've introduced my 7-yr-old to Calvin & Hobbes. She loves them and tries to draw them herself, she's getting pretty good, too.
I had this idea of letting a picture loose on the internet of Calvin how he'd be now, over a decade after Watterson retired. Would it stir interest? Would he pick up his pencil again?
So I suppose here's the result. He's now in his late teens, I guess he's looking through some stuff that's been packed away for a while. Then he finds something he's not seen for a long time.

[iMaiM]

Mad Max!

I really love the comic panel. Your colors remind me of REALLY old MTG cards

Love to see more! keep it up :p

[Wayne R.]

Thanks, iMaiM. The colours are because more because of what they are than what I've done with them. At college I was loaned some of those round blocks of poster paint to do some work at home with. I've done such a small amount of painting since the late 80s that I've still got them! They were perfect to take to remote, boring sites as they didn't make any mess, I'd just find a clean saucer or plate, cut the top off of a Coke can and fill it with water, then off I'd go.
The paper it's on is probably scrounged from college, too.

The 'Insane' one NEARLY got aired in Invert BMX Magazine. They cut right back on colour just as I submitted it, the industry was entering a rough time and only the hardcore fans were still riding.
By the way, I've a Standard STA500 OX in the shed, and I still know how to use it.

[Wayne R.]

These are some studies I did for a character called Merrydith. He was the ghost of a court jester, who'd been a miserable git in life and was a psychopathic supernatural maniac in death.
He 'died' when I came up with other ideas for a story I set in my home town. It grew beyond anything I could ever do as a comic and now languishes as an unpublished novel on my hard drive.

The B&W one is just Quink Ink and water. The colour one is those notorious poster paints again.

[Dan Valkar]

man ur comic pages r very interesting..and well that calvin&hobbes its very good
, nice idea...hahahaha.....and oh well the second jester its great man! creepy expression!!

[Wayne R.]

Some recent stuff, though the idea's really, really old. About 1993 I think.
I had this idea for a demon who works in a Hell that's run like a company. It turned out to be pretty prophetic, this year was my 9th working in a place that's a very rich seam of potential material. So I kind of predicted my fate.
What I think I'm saying is that the way companies are run is modelled on Hell (at least as I depict it), not the other way around.
The main protagonist is a frustrated minor-grade demon with ability and ambition, who finds himself in a dead-end, zero-prospect, no-hope MacJob.
Jeeez, I really nailed this one, it's almost an autobiography.
If anyone remembers Iznogoud, it's that kind of setup. He'll never progress, the gears are just too rigidly set and he's too small a cog. Also, for those with long internet memories, there was once a great site called MyBoss. People were invited to anonymously submit their true tales of management or corporate stupidity, and boy were there some great ones. Some would've been good to wrap over the framework I'd dreamed up.
Unfortunately, the site's creators took all that wonderful and free material and put it into a published book. Money for old rope, a very early internet .com success story. Strangely, submissions dried up after that.
Maybe people thought it was bad enough their bosses riding off their backs without someone else they didn't even know capitalising from their misery.

The title 'Hellish' only came to me this Spring.
Maybe by the time I retire I'll have got a whole strip together...

By the way, the unseen Zic is the Lil Devil's immediate boss. Unfortunately the person he was so obviously based on died unexpectedly in August, so I don't think I'll be keeping his likeness if I draw some more of this stuff.
'Zic' is a sort of pun on 'Second In Charge' or '2IC'.
Chaos is also someone I know.
The toothy, bespectacled face is a sketch is of the Demon Resources Manager. Naturally, it is in no way based on a real person, living or dead, who may or may not work or have ever worked at my current place of employment. Oh no, certainly not.

[Magami]

You're quite skilled with that pen. As for the paintings you posted, nice perspective was achieved. I happen to like Merrydith myself, and know someone who would as well. XD
I should check out your current stuff now, if this sketchbook is a look at your past...

[Wayne R.]

Magami,
The Hell sketches are very recent (the last few weeks in some cases), as is the Calvin at 17 pic. Trouble is, I started sketching that particular piece in February and inked it in August. That's the pace I tend to work at due to lack of time.
The rest are late 80s & early 90s.
Regarding the pen (and pencil) stuff, yeah I think that's my stronger suit. There must be 50 technical pens stashed away somewhere here, and dozens of those Rotring fibretips that don't work anymore. The Calvin one was done with my favourite tool EVER, a penbrush made by Pentel. It's kind of a fountain pen with a brush tip, made for writing Japanese characters. Quite expensive, and I've only ever found two places to buy them!
My painting's always been lousy, the ones shown here somehow managed to be OK by some monkey/typewriter style miracle.
If the Insane pics pass muster it's because they were heavily influenced by Bisley, he was painting The Horned God at the time.

[Wayne R.]

More of the old. One of these days I'll root out some newer material, honest.

The 'molten' stuff was a dream. No idea where it came from, but I had to try to draw it the minute I could find a pencil and paper. The intention was to one day make it, but not being sure why that would be, it went onto the 'indefinitely delayed' pile.
The Judge Gnome pic (another of Ryder's Unfinished) is a mystery. No idea where it came from, and obviously no idea where it was going either.

[Wayne R.]

It's hard to believe the dates on my old posts, but life got in the way and things happened. We sold our house and I left my job, ending up in a colleague's spare room till I'd received my company bonus and served my notice. And whilst I was there, he commissioned me to produce some art for his house. Anything at all, it would be fine with him. He was cautioned that it might well end up being a robot with a big gun, but we went to the local art outlet anyway.
It was all fun and games until we walked out carrying a canvas as wide as a door. This guy thinks big. Far from being keen to start committing paint to cloth, I was (to use a more family-friendly term than I could) soiling my underwear in a rather violent manner.
This would be the first time I'd used canvas since college in the 80s, and it's by no means certain it was real canvas. Might've been textured card. And the size! It was difficult just to move it around to wherever it was being worked on, spare rooms aren't normally the largest in the house. It was the biggest colour picture I've ever done, and a rarity for me to use paint. First time on maybe 15 years, which meant buying more acrylic paint as the ones in the artbox had dried up completely.
Anyhow, the final image was a bit of a cheat. Flesh tones are a nightmare to do right, so the subject wears makeup. Originally there was meant to be some text or a bat-shaped silhouette behind him, but time ran out. The new owner doesn't know, so it's not missed. His young sons called the subject The Trickster, for some reason I could never beat out of them (kidding!!!), but got a blast out of sneaking into my room to stare at it for hours as weekend by weekend it started taking shape.
Here's a stage-by-stage, with a bicyle pump on the last one for scale.