Tuesday, 23 July 2013
The Serpents of Mars
Just a bit of fun here with a panel I found on Kid Robson's blog, from his Conflict on Mars post which features a story from a TV21 annual. The story is illustrated by that classic British illustrator and comic artist Ron Turner, unfortunately the colour isn't that impressive, British annuals from that period had rather acetic look to the colour, not that I want to bad mouth the person responsible because in some instances it's quite passable and he probably had to contend with unreasonable deadlines or rates assigned to the completion of the work. However Turner is rather well known for his versatility with colour and that's especially true for his illustrations for the work of John Russel Fern, AKA Vargo Statten, which are noted for their -- boldness. So I had a go at giving a panel the Statten look, with only marginal success I'm afraid, I lost some the line detail and the black outline isn't really a feature of the Statten look but I though it was worth a post.
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Its great - has just the right quality of light to be effective. Nice sense of menace & atmosphere but at the same time keeps that real comic annual character. I always enjoyed reading strips like this - usually for the art techniques rather than the stories.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the feedback on my last post. I was interested to see which one you chose as your favoutite.
I really enjoy Ron Turner's work, he was a brilliant draughtsman as well as colourist and he had a way rendering black and white work with a strong linear feel but well modelled too, that no one has really emulated. Thanks for the compliment, it was just a bit of fun to see try out a bolder colour approach.
ReplyDeleteIntroducing Alice was very interesting, I liked all the variations and I picked out the first one as my favourite, it contrasts well the plainer fabrics. Rending any pattern is very difficult and you did an excellent job, My favourite painting featuring a patterned fabric is Ingres' Madame Moitessier portrait. Actually it's one of my favourite pictures because of the way the lighting is conveyed so effectively.
Very nice, DSE. It would be great to see all these TV21 Annual stories all properly recoloured.
ReplyDeleteThanks Kid, yeah I'm surprised the annual artwork hasn't received more attention from fans actually. One obstacle is filtering the colour I suppose, I didn't spend too much time on that here because it's quite a bold composition, even so I still lost detail. I don't have any of the Annuals myself but it might interesting to have a go at seeing what could be done with tweaking the scans.
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