Stephen Thompson Art

Magnus 4 preview

2011-05-19T13:19:00.003+01:00

There's a six page, coloured and lettered preview of Magnus 4 up on the Dark Horse website which you can see here. Unfortunately this was the only issue I got to do 'cause it got cancelled. Inks by the wonderful Mark Irwin and colours by equally wonderful Wes Dzioba.

Creature Colour Test

2011-04-30T16:43:00.001+01:00

This is just a little test piece where I'm trying out ways to colour my pencils on Photoshop. I'd like to eventually do a full comic this way.

Smokey Joe

2010-06-13T18:21:00.002+01:00

I've never really used Photoshop for much beyond colouring, probably because you have to fiddle with the default brushes quite a lot to get something that's nice to draw with. Here's a Photoshop sketch of a guy smoking for no particular reason. Also I just realised he has no eyebrow.

Abe Sapien coloured

2010-02-05T15:00:00.002Z

This was done for the Eclectic Micks blog originally, but I went with the black and white version in the end.

Near Death

2010-01-01T15:12:00.005Z

I've recently decided to do my own graphic novel called 'Near Death', so I've created a blog here to chart it's progress from soup to nuts. Please come on over and watch as I struggle to write and letter a comic for the first time and attempt to get the thing published. I'll keep updating this blog with art from my work-for-hire books though.

Die Hard 2 Preview

2009-10-24T22:31:00.002+01:00

The fine folks at Comic Book Resources have put up a lettered preview of Die Hard issue two here. That is all.

Die Hard 1 preview

2009-09-29T22:14:00.002+01:00

There's a nice chunk of Die Hard 1 up on CBR here. Hat's off to colourist Matthew Wilson who really made the finished product look good. Issue 1 is out tomorrow in the States and Thursday over here.

Line sketches

2009-08-24T16:35:00.003+01:00

Some sketches done with a dead line marker tool in Manga Studio. I was trying to push the cartoony design of the faces but I think I fell back on old habits pretty quickly here. It's hard to break away from a lifetime of stock faces.

Experiments

2009-08-18T15:33:00.002+01:00

I was dicking around with Manga Studio, experimenting a little and seeing what came out of it. I had been playing with a story that'd be set in two different times and thought it'd be good to try and visually separate them a little. So the first panel is drawn only with the marker tools which give you a really dead line, kind of like you'd get with felt tip pens. The second one is drawn with the 'maru' tool, which emulates a type of Japanese dip-pen nib. Gives you much more thick-to-thin variation. Both of them are tied together with some screen tone goodness.

Girl-face

2009-08-16T20:46:00.002+01:00

I usually have to work up a sketch at the eleventh hour for the Eclectic Micks sketchblog every Thursday morning, so I was pretty happy when I did this while doodling for fun today. Grand, I thought, all set for Thursday four days in advance. Then I realised I'd drawn yet another headshot. Considering about seventeen of my twenty four posts on Micks have also been headshots I thought I should just stick this up here and start over. I'll probably leave it until Thursday morning.

What's Chaykin...

2009-06-17T18:54:00.002+01:00

Comic book resources has a good meaty interview with Howard Chaykin about Die Hard: Year One here. No interior preview art yet but there are a few covers and I get a nice mention at the end.

Die Hard, BOOM!

2009-05-29T17:46:00.002+01:00

So the news is out now, BOOM! are releasing a Die Hard: Year One book. Howard Chaykin is writing it and I'm drawing it. Covers are being provided by Dave Johnson, Jock and JP Leon. It follows John McClane during his rookie year as a New York cop in 1976. I dashed off this sketch when I first got the job, just to try and get a feel for drawing Mr. Willis, with some 70's style hair for good measure.

Thompson Thursday 9

2009-04-30T12:02:00.002+01:00

Bit of a departure for me this Thompson Thursday over on the Micks blog. My first colour piece and an offbeat character too.

Portrait

2009-04-29T16:36:00.002+01:00

I'm all out of animal drawings so here's a boring old human. I did this with a blue biro, which I used to draw with quite a lot when I was younger just because there was so many of them about. A lot of my very early comic style drawings were done this way too because I didn't know any better. Took me a surprising amount of time to try using a felt tip or marker to ink with.

Menagerie 2

2009-04-28T11:17:00.005+01:00

Here's some more animal drawings from that same Dublin Zoo trip. Except for the last one, that's a drawing of my late dog, Blitz.

Menagerie 1

2009-04-27T10:03:00.004+01:00

I can't for the life of me remember drawing these, but I guess they're from some trip to Dublin zoo during college. They're a bit grainy because they're scanned from photocopies, I couldn't find the originals anywhere. Pen with grey marker.

Sketch dump 4

2009-04-26T12:02:00.002+01:00

So I've been cleaning out the studio some more, throwing as much out as I can part with and organising the rest. I found a few sketchbooks and lots of loose pages, some with half decent sketches on them. Here's some of the highlights.

Thompson Thursday 7

2009-04-16T11:21:00.001+01:00

Okay, looks like I didn't remedy that lack of posting at all. The next Thompson Thursday pic is up on the old Micks blog. Enjoy.

Thompson Thursday 6

2009-04-09T08:41:00.003+01:00

Looks like I haven't posted here since last Thompson Thursday, gotta remedy that. Anyway head over to the Eclectic Micks sketchblog for some more pictorial goodness.

Thompson Thursday 5

2009-04-02T10:59:00.002+01:00

Hullo all, it Thompson Thursday yet again over on the Eclectic Micks Sketchblog. So get your eyeballs over there pronto for the full picture.

Sketch dump 3

2009-03-31T17:43:00.003+01:00

I found an old sketchbook today that dates from about the 2000-2001 period. The whole thing was full and this little head shot was the only decent drawing in the whole book. The rest was a sea of horrible, amateurish crapolla.

Skeletons & exoskeletons

2009-03-29T12:22:00.003+01:00

Another trawl through the Thompson archives brought up these drawings from the Natural History Museum in Dublin. They date from about ten years ago now, which would put me in my second year of college.

I love natural history museums and make a point of visiting one whenever I travel to a major city. My favourite by far is the one in London. Museums in general over the last decade or so have started replacing exhibits of the animals themselves, skeletons and fossils and the like, with really annoying 'interactive displays' that look like half assed computer games circa 1989.

The Natural History Museum of Dublin on the other hand is almost a museum of a museum. It hasn't changed very much from the Victorian cabinet museum it started out as. Down the back they still have rows of dark-wood, glass-topped displays, with leather covers. Flip back a cover and you'll see rows of mounted insects, some really monstrous ones. I got such a kick out of that as a kid.

Robots!

2009-03-27T16:56:00.003Z

So I've been sorting through piles of random drawings in an effort to turn the studio into a useable space. At the moment most of the floor is covered in piles of books, comics, paper, and art materials with two clear paths leading from the door to myself and my girlfriend's desks. Most of my old drawings are not worth keeping but I was quite happy with these two robot designs, probably inspired by the 'Art of Star Wars' books that I was enamored with at the time. The pose of the second one was based on Mr. C Montgomery Burns.

Thompson Thursday 4

2009-03-26T09:36:00.002Z

You know what time it is. Time to get yourself over to the Eclectic Micks Sketchblog and show us some love.

Sketch dump 2

2009-03-21T08:34:00.002Z

More random sketches taken from the back of scripts and shopping lists. Nature's sketchbooks.

Sketch dump

2009-03-20T16:20:00.004Z

I'm super busy at the minute so here are a bunch of random sketches I found while sorting through a pile of old crap. Mostly drawn on the margins of pages and the back of envelopes.

Thompson Thursday 3

2009-03-19T13:21:00.002Z

It's Thompson Thursday again over at the Eclectic Mick's sketchblog. So go there posthaste and leave a witty comment so I look popular.

Mr. Vampire

2009-03-18T13:56:00.003Z

I hate pretty vampires. They should be monsters, not teen dreamboats. Feculent, hairy, pointy-eared creatures of the night. I'll give the Buffy-verse kudos for at least having them change into monsters when they feed.

Firebug

2009-03-17T09:14:00.003Z

Playing around with pencil again, mainly as a break from inking everything I draw. I tend to get sick of one type of media if I'm forced to use it constantly and start to wish I could switch to something else for a while.

Pink & Green

2009-03-16T11:30:00.002Z

Just realised this colour scheme makes me think of watermelon...

Today's panel

2009-03-14T15:42:00.002Z

Work continues apace on this book I'm doing for IDW. I liked how this panel turned out, although the lettering on the side of the UPS truck was a bit of a chore.

Thompson Thursday

2009-03-12T13:30:00.003Z

Well it's 'Thompson Thursday' again over at the Eclectic Micks sketchblog. Click on over to see all of today's drawing here.

Yet more life drawing

2009-03-07T12:40:00.003Z

here's a couple more. Again drawn with a felt tip pen, a .5 Staedtler pigment liner I think. The scanner cut the top off one of these but it was by far the worst part of the drawing, so no big loss there.

Life drawing

2009-03-06T15:08:00.004Z

So I went to a life drawing class for the first time since college, which at this point is about eight years ago, shockingly. It was always my favourite class back then so I've been itching to do it for years. Took a few drawings to get back into the swing of it, and I ended up getting my best results when I ditched the charcoal and just used a felt-tip pen. The only down side was that two hours really wasn't enough, I miss the all day sessions from back in college. The tops of these drawings are a bit blurry 'cause I couldn't fold the sketchbook flat to scan them fully.

Eclectic Micks

2009-03-04T21:43:00.002Z

Myself and a group of Irish comic book artists have started a brand new sketchblog to feature our diverse 'talents'. It's called Eclectic Micks and you can find it here. We've all picked a day of the week to post a new drawing:- Stephen Mooney on Mondays, Declan Shalvey on Tuesdays, Will Sliney on Wednesdays, me on Thursdays, Bob Byrne on Fridays and Nick Roche on Sundays. At the moment it's anything goes as far as subject matter is concerned, but in future we're planning on having theme weeks and that sort of thing. Please drop by and let us know what you think.

Dancer

2009-02-10T21:06:00.003Z

So I'm back working on my IDW project and It feels slightly weird to be inking again. I tend to be very impatient with any process that involves lots of chopping and changing between implements, so it can be a pain dealing with multiple felt tips, brush's, brushpens, markers, technical pens and various forms of whiteout. Plus I'd forgotten just how annoying it is when you ink something and then smear it across the page with your hand. One of the wonderful aspects of pencilling is the simplicity of a couple of pencils and an eraser. But anyway here's a panel from today's page that I thought came out pretty well.

Marvel zombie

2009-02-04T20:44:00.003Z

Marvel Zombies probably would've been my ideal comic to draw. I tend to prefer to draw stuff that's cruddy and falling apart, rather than shiny and new. Which is probably why I'm not a big fan of drawing the sexy ladies, I'd much rather draw an old crone any day. On a similar note I had a great time doing a lot of destroyed buildings and debris on my recent Marvel job, the random aspect of damaged things also you don't have to be too precise. Makes it easy as pie.

Silver Surfer

2009-02-02T20:16:00.003Z

Things I didn't know about the Silver Surfer until I went to draw this sketch: he has no ears. Who knew? Aerodynamic reasons maybe..?

Weird face

2009-02-01T22:34:00.004Z

So last year I was one of the lucky people who won Marvel's Chesterquest talent search, organised by the venerable C.B. Cebulski. It's taken a while for scripts and such to get finalised but I've just finished my first job for Marvel, a little eight pager for an anthology that'll be published...sometime this year I suppose. So the reason I haven't posted anything new in a while is because I can't show anything from this job. Plus when I'm working I tend not to draw anything else, even random little doodles. But now that I'm finished here's a....one of these. Your guess is as good as mine.

Drawn with the super chunky Cretacolor. 430 02 leadholder and a HB Pitt graphite stick from Faber-Castell.

Captain Britain

2009-01-10T12:05:00.002Z

Here's one of the better, non Lego based, sketches I did at the Dublin comic con a few months ago. His proportions are a bit out of whack, but I suppose that's what you get for going straight to ink with no pencils. Thanks to Wade Campbell for the scan.

Lego Dredd

2008-12-28T12:22:00.005Z

I haven't updated the blog for a while, mainly due to a series of annoying ailments that have kept me from the drawing board. Flu, back pain and viral vertigo included. So as I have no new art to show I thought I'd post this sketch I drew at the Dublin Comic Con this year. James here was requesting lego versions of comic characters from all the artists, you can see a gallery of the others here. Thanks to Stephen Mooney for the 'Lego City 1' gag.

The inks

2008-12-11T00:10:00.002Z

Here's the inks for that panel. I'm trying to use a nice range of tools to give a variety of marks, as that's something I've always liked in other artist's work. Mainly it's calligraphy pen, brush pen and pigment liner. I'm also avoiding using a ruler to ink the straight lines, to give them a more organic look.

Today's panel

2008-12-10T19:24:00.003Z

Every now and then I'll do a nice, simple panel that I'm really happy with. Nothing flashy, it could just be something simple, with good storytelling, an interesting composition, or just an image that turned out exactly the way i wanted it to. This is one of those panels.

The inks

2008-12-04T21:41:00.003Z

Here's the final inks. I tried to eliminate as much of the white areas as I could, to bring it as close to a silhouette as possible. Mainly so it would contrast well with the detail of the background. I was tempted to just black the figure in completely except for the flame of his lighter but couldn't bring myself to do it...

Silhouette

2008-12-02T10:02:00.004Z

In an attempt to add more clarity to my pages and strip away some of the unnecessary busyness I tend to throw in there, I've been looking at a lot of Alex Toth and reading some of his ideas on design and staging. I found a perfect page to try this out on (a man leaning in a doorway lighting a cigarette)......and then I completely chickened out and fell back on my usual schtick. Half way through drawing it I realised it wasn't working and when a friend of mine, Declan Shalvey, agreed it was a dud, I abandoned it and tried again. I'm much happier with this second attempt.

Panel inks

2008-11-30T00:29:00.002Z

Here's the inks for that panel I posted pencils of a while back. I meant to put this up sooner but the Dublin con and it's aftermath kind of threw me off course. Still can't give out any details on this new project for IDW but it's a pleasant change of pace for me. I'm trying to keep the inking loose and spontaneous on this project, I've been looking at a lot of J.P. Leon in particular. This is mainly inked with a Pentel brushpen and Staedtler pigment liners.

45

2008-11-25T19:59:00.004Z

This is a colour rough for a book I'm contributing to called 45 which will be published by Com.X next year. The writer, Andi Ewington, has rounded up a pretty impressive list of top level talant...and me.

Dublin comic con

2008-11-24T19:38:00.004Z

Recovering from the Dublin comic con today, which was an extremely enjoyable but exhausting affair. Drew a whole slew of sketches for people, some of the more unusual requests included a lego Judge Dredd and lego Conan. I got to catch up with some of the guys I met last year like Matt Hollingsworth and C.B. Cebulski, hang out with the Irish crowd (Shalvey, Mooney and Roche) and I also got to meet some artists who's work I really love like Tommy Lee Edwards and Olivier Coipel.

One of the great benefits of dragging your girlfriend to a con while you're working is that you can send them to get sketches for you. Girls generally get better stuff from comic pro's, as they provide a welcome break from thirty year old dudes who start their request for a sketch with phrases like "I've got a challange for you..." So here are the fruits of her excellent queueing.

Shadow art by Tommy Lee Edwards

Thor art by Olivier Coipel

Rage colours

2008-11-21T14:53:00.004Z

My girlfriend, Lisa Jackson, mainly works as an illustrator (that's her in my photo, poking her head in from the right) but she's been known to dip her toe into the world of comic book colouring. Here are a couple of my 'Valley of the Rage' pages she coloured up, as an example of her 'mad skills'. She went on to work for IDW, mainly colouring Stephen Mooney's artwork on comics like 'Angel' and 'The Mummy'. You can find her at http://lisajacksonart.blogspot.com/

Today's panel

2008-11-20T19:40:00.002Z

I've started work on my new project but nothing's been announced about it yet so I should probably keep the details to myself. I'm taking a break from the cintiq so I've gone back to a more traditional approach for the moment, pencil and paper. Here's my favourite panel from the page I'm working on now, drawn with blue lead. I'll try and put the inks up tomorrow.

Assorted heads

2008-11-15T00:18:00.002Z

It's really easy to fall into the habit of drawing a 'standard' face on all your characters. Paul Azaceta did a great job of distinguishing a group of men in uniform in B.P.R.D 1947, which made me want to focus on making my made up faces look distinct. Here are a few of my attempts, drawn from the imagination with a felt tip calligraphy pen and a Pentel brush pen.

Corpse dream

2008-11-08T12:31:00.002Z

I was playing around with a felt tip calligraphy pen on the back of a shopping list and came up with this. I liked it well enough to colour it up and stick it on here. Not really sure what's going on in this sketch though...

Talk to the hand

2008-11-07T20:33:00.003Z

I can't really show any art from the stuff I'm working on at the moment, so here's a panel from some sample Marvel pages I did recently.

Rue Bourbon

2008-10-28T16:58:00.005Z

So it looks like my next project will be a crime book for IDW, Huzzah! I don't know much about it at this point so I decided to do a generic 'crime montage' to get my feet wet. Guns! Dames! Cops! Etc! It's handy really, just as my interests were turning towards artists like Goran Parlov, Sean Phillips, Michael Lark and the like, a project comes along which suits that kind of approach. Now to colour...

Tough guy

2008-10-20T16:35:00.005+01:00

In an attempt to update this blog more regularly I'll be posting some pictures that are more, as we say in the business, crummy. Rough sketches and doodles rather than finished pages. Here's a straight-to-ink piece that I mainly drew with a Faber Castell PITT brush pen. The original measures about 5cm tall. Influenced by reading too much of Sean Phillips's blog in one go...

Some bloke

2008-10-17T22:09:00.006+01:00

I was around at (fellow Irish comics luminary) Declan Shalvey's the other day and had a chance to pour over the original art for his Frankenstein graphic novel, which he'd had shipped back from Scotland. This combined with my girly man-crush on the brilliant work of Goran Parlov, who recently finished up his run on Ennis's Punisher series, made me want to try a more stripped down and cartoony style. Here's my first stab at it, inked with a brush and coloured with Corel Painter on the Cintiq.

More McCain

2008-10-01T17:59:00.009+01:00

Here's a few more pages from the McCain book, which comes out next week. These pages have already been seen on the interweb, but there was rather a lot of lettering on them. I've dispensed with all that messy information so you can get a better look at the art without having to learn anything.

McCain, page 2

Colours by Len O'Grady

McCain, page 4

Colours by Len O'Grady

McCain, page 5

Colours by Len O'Grady

McCain Preview

2008-09-26T10:10:00.015+01:00

Some reviews of McCain: Presidential Material are starting to pop up in the wild, so I think it's safe for me to post some pages here. Both the McCain and Obama books are 28 pages of non stop, jaw dropping, political action! They'll be released on the 8th of October along with a flip-book containing both issues if you're of a bipartisan leaning, or even just bi-curious.

McCain page 1

Colours by Len O'Grady

McCain page 3

Colours by Len O'Grady

Wrath

2008-08-28T15:04:00.008+01:00

Here's another project I did some work on a couple of years ago that failed to materialise. 'Wrath' was supposed to be a graphic novel which I would be pencilling, inking and colouring myself, and all this in the pre-Cintiq days of yesteryear. I did these six pages before the funding for the project fell through, although it did directly lead to me getting the 'Valley of the Rage' job at Fangoria so it ended well. In retrospect I'm kind of glad it worked out that way, these pages took forever to produce so I'd probably still be at it.

Chopper

2008-08-25T18:16:00.005+01:00

I'm going to post some work from projects that never got off the ground for various reasons. Well they didn't get off the ground with ME drawing them anyway. Firstly is a sample page I did for a comic called Chopper, although I'm not sure what company this was for. I think they ended up going with a different artist who had a more 'Image-y' type style.

The Presidential Candidates Comic on CNN

2008-08-20T16:03:00.004+01:00

Lisa here again, blogging on behalf on Stephen. CNN did a piece on the Presidential Candidates comics.

To see the video on their website click here.

Lots of the artwork is shown and there's a great Benny Hill bit at the start.

Presidential Candidate McCain Comic

2008-07-31T18:42:00.005+01:00

This is Lisa blogging on behalf of Stephen, because he's so busy right now.

Currently, he's drawing the Presidential Material: John McCain comic, to give it it's official title.

They haven't released any of the interior artwork at the moment so we can't show you that just yet. But, I can say that it does kick ass. Tons of hard work and referencing has gone into it to make it as accurate as possible.

Here are both of the covers by J Scott Campbell.

There's a lot of buzz around these comics and here are some of the links, in no particular order:

The Los Angeles Times

Professor X.

2008-05-18T20:00:00.003+01:00

So this is a quick, fifteen minute sketch of Professor X I drew in Painter on my Cintiq. This is how loose and sketchy I'd like to draw but it never seems to happen when I get to the actual page. I'm hoping to use this style on an upcoming one-shot I'm doing for IDW, as it may suit the subject matter, which is a bit left of centre.

New Frontier 3

2008-03-24T15:43:00.008Z

Issue 1, page 1

Colours by Len O'Grady

Issue 1, page 2

Colours by Len O'Grady

New Frontier 3, cover

2008-03-21T22:32:00.003Z

New Frontier 4, cover

2008-03-17T14:32:00.004Z

Colours by Len O' Grady

New Frontier 1

2008-03-14T15:12:00.008Z

Issue 1, page 1

Issue 1, page 2

Issue 1, page 3

Issue 1, page 4

Issue 1, page 5

New Frontier 2, cover

2008-02-05T08:23:00.000Z

Colours by Len O' Grady

New Frontier 1, retailer cover

2008-02-02T09:29:00.003Z

Colours by Len O' Grady

New Frontier 1, quad cover B

2008-02-02T09:22:00.001Z

Colours by Len O' Grady

New Frontier 1, quad cover A

2008-01-29T21:01:00.000Z

Quad cover B

Colours by Len O' Grady

Shifter 1, cover

2007-11-21T14:49:00.001Z

Beneath the Valley of the Rage 1

2007-11-21T14:22:00.000Z

Issue 1, page 10

Issue 1, page 14

Issue 1, page 15

Beneath the Valley of the Rage 2, cover

2007-10-20T21:06:00.000+01:00

Beneath the Valley of the Rage 4

2007-10-20T19:55:00.000+01:00

Beneath the Valley of the Rage 4, cover

2007-09-24T14:32:00.000+01:00

Beneath the Valley of the Rage 3, cover

2007-09-17T21:36:00.001+01:00

Beneath the Valley of the Rage 2

2007-09-17T20:46:00.000+01:00

Issue 2, page 13

Issue 2, page 14

Issue 2, page 15

Issue 2, page 16

Issue 2, page 17

Issue 2, page 18

Beneath the Valley of the Rage 1, cover

2007-06-09T16:34:00.000+01:00

Beneath the Valley of the Rage

2007-06-09T15:46:00.000+01:00

Issue 1, page 1

Issue 1, page 2

Issue 1, page 3

Wrath Cover

2007-06-09T15:12:00.001+01:00

Pencils, inks and colours by Stephen Thompson