Jim Murray

I've always been fairly impressed with the art of Jim Murray, he arrived on the 2000AD scene much around the same time as a few other "Bisley Clones" with his painted work. But I saw his ink work in issues of the now long dead series 'Dredd Lawman of the Future' that came out when the Dredd movie was doing the rounds. The man can draw and therefore you know he's not just hiding behind painting techniques to cover up any potentially bad foundation work.

He's therefore become, and rightly so, a major talent and his website (see 'Links of note' to the right) shows off some super lovely work, mostly for the gaming industry. He has posted a Flash animation of one of his paintings being worked up that is well worth checking out, great to see work in progress. Click here if you already have Flash installed or go to his website for a link to get the Flash reader.

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Pleased as punch...

If your heading to ISO Block 226 in downtown Mega-City One you'll no doubt be travelling on the GN REID Underzoom at some point! Artist, Matt 'D'Israeli' Brooker has immortalised myself and fellow artist Shane Oakley with name checks in the latest Judge Dredd strip in this weeks issue of 2000 AD, the Galaxy's Greatest Comic.

Check out his Blog post here.

I haven't seen the final printed version myself yet but either way I'm chuffed :) I had the great honour of getting to know Matt while he visited and lived in Edinburgh for nearly a year (I think) and we had many a good chat in various coffee shops. A nicer man you could not hope to meet and each meeting left me charged with energy to pick up a pencil and get some drawing done. Cheers Matt, you da man!

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Spring cleaning in the Summer...

The eagle-eyed of my two regular readers will have noticed a slight change to the 'blog' site in layout and colours etc. Also the new illustrated header above that appears also on my newly updated illustration website.

I'd been planning to update my 'proper' website for about a year now and this is actually only a 'stop gap' site until I unleash an all singing all dancing new fancy website hopefully sometime this year. I had planned on creating a new Flash (animated web application that many sites are created with) site a while back but have found that since I last used the application (four or five years ago now) its changed and improved drastically and I'll need to re-learn how to do so. So in the meanwhile I created this incarnation of my site to help showcase not just the comic work style illustrations I've produced but a good helping of the commercial work too.

Its not set exactly the way I'd hoped it would be as I pretty much used Adobe's Image Ready application to create it. So when you click on an image you want to see instead of it loading in the same main webpage your already in re-loads the entire page to show you the image, not great but its pretty quick and once its loaded once you don't have to re-load it again to go back and see it again. Anyway, I'm happy enough with it until I get the new site all figured out and running.

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Passing time

Just doodling about instead of getting on with something else...

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Mike Wieringo

Shocked to read today on many different websites the sad passing of artist Mike Wieringo. Mike had a very prolific career working in comics and drew most superhero characters you could think of. Anyone that knows me will know that I haven't read and don't read a lot of American superhero comics so I'll be the first to admit that I haven't seen a fraction of the work that Mike produced. However, I do know that nearly two years ago I started dropping by his website and fell in love with the "Soap Box" blogs he posted, which also included an always fantastic sketch.

The man could draw, and it was an inspiration to see his work. Its funny how much time I've spent over the years looking at the internet and its a love hate relationship. I often feel like I'd like to get rid of broadband internet but I've become reliant on e-mail and internet as it supplies me work and communication with friends and colleagues. If it wasn't for the internet I'd never have seen Mike's blog sketches and get to know the man. Its amazing how close you can feel to somebody who you have never met and they have no idea of your existence. Every three or four days I'd drop by Mike's site and get a dose of 'Ringo' and at Entry 411 it all stops.

Mike died aged 44 of a heart attack. I'll miss you Mike, all the best. My thoughts go to your family.

http://www.mikewieringo.com/

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