Sydney Comic Art and Drawing Exhibition

Anyone who lives in, or who is passing through Sydney, can come and see some of the pieces I've put up at the Sydney Comic Art & Drawing Exhibition, and some work by other talented Sydney artists.

The exhibition is at the ArtSHINE Gallery, in the CoSydney Coworking Space at 3 Blackfriars Street, Chippendale, in Sydney, running from 14th to 30th of April, from 10am to 5pm weekdays, and 11am to 4 pm weekends.

I'll be exhibiting these pieces (which has required me to come up with titles for them, something I should have done a while back:

 Pop-Art Owl

 The Battle of Brick Lane

 The Gentleman

 Twisted Romance

 L'ermitage

Summer

Acquisition (page 1)

©2015 James Mathurin

Acquisition, the complete first story

  I realised I should put the whole comic in one post. Here it is! All of Acquisition, part 1.

©2015 James Mathurin

Acquisition cover

So, this means that Acquisition is finally finished, or at least the first story.

 I tried some different techniques (seeing as a whole reason for doing Acquisition was to experiment and try new things). Rather than detailed pencils and inks, I did a pencil rough of the figure and the cybernetic organs, which I scanned and inked and coloured digitally.

I had the text for the boxes already written down, and I tried a couple of different ways of arranging them, and frankly, I'm not sure what I was thinking with the first version, below. Still, the more composed version above works better to my eye.

©2015 James Mathurin

Acquisition, Page 8

Blimey, I started this in 2011, and this is the final page (although, I still want to do a cover). But, yeah, here's the final page of the first story of Acquisition.

©2015 James Mathurin

Acquisition, Page 8, Inks

Trying to get what will be the final page of my Acquisition comic finished before I head back to the UK for Christmas (which will cause a bit of a break in my posting, though I'll get some different stuff on in the meantime).

These are the inks (on their own, and with all the layers underneath), before I add the shades and words.

©2014 James Mathurin

Acquisition, Page 8 pencils

I realised I haven't posted much lately, so here's the beginnings of the final page of my Acquisition story.

I intended this to be a learning experience, and one of the things I've learned is that there is wisdom in spreading your story out over more pages. I had headaches over the layout, but I'm glad I finally found an arrangement that worked.

I got the rough layout done, before I had one of those annoying 'should have thought of that sooner' moments, when I realised I had no idea what the doctors, who I only scripted for one panel, looked like. 

In the end, I came up with a kind of hazmat-looking outfit for them, then I could get going.

I did my rough pencils, and made the rooms less boxy, to differentiate from the other architecture.

So, then I just had to finish the pencils (and, just to be able to see them, I also removed the orange in the picture at the top).

©2014 James Mathurin

Acquisition, Page 7

So, after finishing the stuff I'd been doing with my comics group, I went back to the unfinished Page 7 of Acquisition. So, here it is, shaded and lettered.

©2014 James Mathurin

Acquisition, Page 7 Inks

Been working on the latest page of Acquisition, got some inks done, pretty happy with it so far.

©2014 James Mathurin

Acquisition Page 7 pencils

So, while I've been working on some other stuff, I also thought it was way past time I started working on the next page of Acquisition. Kind of annoyed with myself for not using the second colour pencil to lay out things like perspective, etc. before, it's such a basic thing I've seen other artists doing, and makes a big difference.

©2014 James Mathurin

Acquisition sketches

Here are some of the sketches I did for the KN Corporation droid, and the target from the most recent page of Acquisition.

©2014 James Mathurin

Acquisition, Page 6

So, here it is, page 6 of Acquisition. I'm enjoying learning from my mistakes on this, and hopeing that I'll have come up with some really good new ones by the time I'm done. Should be only 2 pages and a cover left, unless plans change. Again.

But I'm sure that won't happen.

©2013 James Mathurin

Acquisition, Page 6, finished art

So, shading and other duties are finished on here, only dialogue left!

©2013 James Mathurin

Acquisition Page 6, finished inks

So, a combination of inks...

  and a little computer blocking in the black bits, and here's the black and white of page 6...

©2013 James Mathurin

Acquisition Page 6, first inks

Finished the first pass of inking on page 6, so there's some outlining and blocking black areas to go. Again, finding the A3 scanner great to use.

©2013 James Mathurin

New Acquisition Pencils - Page 6

It's been a while since I was able to get back to Acquisition, plus this page was giving me a bit of a headache as to how I laid it out.

ANYWAY, I settled on this arrangement, and got the pencils finished.

Also, I'm loving the new A3 scanner my wife got me. I was able to do a quick scan of the inks I've done today, and put them up. Previously this would have taken about half an hour of scanning A4 size and trying to stitch the pieces together in Photoshop, and now it is the work of mere minutes.

So, yay.

©2013 James Mathurin

Acquisition, Page 5

Been staying up to finish this (and I had to rewrite chucks of the text from my original script, because it didn't work with the new layout I'd worked out), so here it is! Page 5, now complete with lovely words!

©2013 James Mathurin

Acquisition, Page 5, shaded

I've been working on this page for ages now! Well, there's been lots of  other stuff in the meantime too, but it's nice to have it done and shaded. As I said before, I tried a few experiments with the colouring / shading, and ... well, at least I learnt a few things, and that's ultimately what experiments are about.

©2013 James Mathurin

Acquisition, Page 5, inked

So, the finished inks have been sitting around my living room for a couple of weeks, but I've been too busy to scan it. So here it is:

This is actually the first time I've seen it without the pencil lines, so it's always looked like the version below. I've still got plenty of work to do on it, but again, that was the point of this, to try some new things.

©2012 James Mathurin