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  how could any one be unhappy with a comparison like that! If my backgrounds are even a tenth as intersting as Kev O'Neill I must be doing something right.

That is Tyranny Rex over near Rogue and Venus, she is feeling up the bicep of a too small to recognise Slaine. Judge Death it seems can't handle his synth whiskey.

the bar was set high and it's pretty much stayed there so I thought i would make up for my lame Robocop is Dredd joke by not skimping on the detail!

Steven

Thanks everybody! I may well colour this if I have time before the end of the comp.

Here is a link to the full size version. It's a bit tricky in black and white to see who all the characters in the background are as they are so small, but they are all meant to be some one from 2000ad.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9272274@N03/5127603627/sizes/l/in/photostream/

The Snake Pliskin looking guy on the floor is Nick Stone from Meltdown Man.

ummmm, I ran out of time or I would of coloured this

Great work one and all, great ides intimidating high quality. Kev, Rich: that really is something special! I'm about half way though mine. I definitely think this thread has a 'pin-up prog' in it, maybe at the end of the year. If Tharg isn't interested I'm sure someone in the small press would be...

Thanks  I drew a 4 page story a few years ago to practice capturing an actor's likeness for a strip. I'll tell you this give me primordial evil and inverted spheres of negative space over making a drawing look like a real person any day!

Geof Darrow has made a name for himself doing insanely detailed crowd scenes loosely strung together by a slight story (I'm thinking mostly of hard boiled) and I'm pretty sure Ron Smith was never that fussed about packing out his strips with impressively large crowds but Mick McMahon and Brian Bolland however quit Dredd ostensibly over the huge crowds in block-mania.

What can we learn from this?

Don't give a crowd heavy story to an artist who hates drawing crowds and if you are going to have horses in your strip make sure your artist can draw horses!

We could always help the artist by making it easy to use the copy/paste functions:

"A hundred thousand identical clones, all dressed in the same overalls, march in-step towards their goal*."


* An incandescent orb of pure sleep. (Well, you've still got to give your artist some challenges) 

A few years ago when faced with drawing several ranks of robots that's exactly what I did (I like to think the orb of pure sleep is implied)

So, um, what does a writer, er, write if they want a crowd scene?

Is it just the repetition of words which gets his goat?  Or is it irritation that they have to draw so many people so often? (Granted, there shouldn't be that many crowd scenes in one script, and should they go on more than a panel, some of those should be close in on a couple of characters so you wouldn't have to redraw lots of folk.)

I think the issue artist have with crowd scenes (battles and vast army's or teams that seem to get squeezed into every frame just so the audience doesn't forget the comic has 8 stars) is it's easy to write the words 'the small trickle of protesters filter from a side road into a vast march. It is now obvious to the reader that this is not a fringe movement but a massive outpouring of emotion and anger flooding across the whole city' and then 2 pages later  'as the protesters turned the corner they are face with the disheartening sight of Judge Dredd standing in front of ten thousand riot suited  Judges .' but it takes a lot longer to draw. Fun as it may be to have an epic reveal every 3 pages it's a pain in the ass to draw.

Bloody Hell thats good! well thats this Comp off to a great start.

I've been following your work in sketch up on your blog Kev. It looks fantastic, your designs are outstanding and I'm sure the strips you are working on will benefit from the shear amount of work that will have gone into the backgrounds. It's enough to make mw want to fire up my pc and switch on the nearest 3d app! Blender looks ideal for doing background perspective underlay's, maybe I will give it a go sometime.

I used to build 3d backgrounds in Cinema 4D (a really old version I bought in 2001) but I found I was getting more and more obsessed with the detail, eventually going from background layouts to rendered textured background images. After it took me 8 months to finish a 6 page story for Futurequake I Decided to put my 3D programs away and dray it all by hand. then I got creative block and pretty much all I can do now is colour!

Ha!

who wouldn't run from a naked Dredd, Lady Festina?

Dandontdare, best ending so far!

Dredd just can't get a break can he mogzilla?

  I am Chuffed to bits, witch sounds a lot nastier than it actually is, to come first on my first roll of the dice. I hope the competition keeps going ideally under the hand of Jim.
Thanks to everyone who voted for me, I enjoyed all the entrees, good ideas and damn fin art!

I have over the years I have signed up to this board a number of times but never really got into the habit of posting. (Mostly because I didn't like it aesthetically until the most recent re-vamp) I spent a few years on 2000ad review, where the posting was slower and less lively thanks to its far narrower remit,  but the mod policy of keep it cool and reasonable or face having your post deleted was a good one. Everyone is entitled to both subjective and objective opinions and it's a shame to have to introduce rules on how they are allowed to express them but there has to be a line or you end up with the car crash that is youtube comments.

Ooh, nasty! And I'll be lenient on the few extra words for another competition newbie (I think)....

Note, folks: writer also spotted in art comp doing some rather fine work. Multi-talented litte <mutter, mutter>.

Like most comic artist for some reason I often think I can write as well as draw.

bluemeanie, simply brilliant,

Richmond,Great Ideas, good story, cleanly executed.

I see another thread entering my daily reading routine