Author: Darren Reynolds

End of year lists

I don’t usually bother with end of year lists or top tens but I enjoy seeing other peoples books and pull lists so what the hell, why not? Not a comprehensive list of everything I read in 2022, just a few personal faves.

First up, Short and Curious by PJ Holden available on gumroad.

I know, I know… I’ve posted about this before but I bloody love it! I also wanted to show off the lil A5 copy I printed on the big old duplex copier at work… even dusted off my long arm stapler too.

The Essential Guide to Comic Book Lettering by Nate Piekos. While the book primarily focuses on using Adobe Illustrator there’s lot’s of useful guides and info. I’m really gonna have to make time to try out the stuff here and see if I can adapt the workflows in Affinity Designer.

Cyberpunk 2077: Blackout by Bartosz Sztybor and Roberto Ricci was a must-buy for me after seeing Roberto’s process posts on twitter.

The Dragon Path by Ethan Young was an absolute delight from start to finish. Some fanart is well overdue for this fantastic book.

Dream Fossil: The Complete Stories of Satoshi Kon. I’ve had this on my bed side table for the past year and have read it now at least ten times. The stories collected are simply phenomenal, from the eeriness of ‘Guests’ to the sheer joy of ‘Beyond the sun’.

Kroma by Lorenzo De Felici. One of my favourite books on the stands at the moment, Lorenzo is producing something incredible with Kroma.

SKYBOUND X has been on my pull list since it started and issue 25 was excellent. Battle Beast, Kirkman, Ottley, need I say more?

Ok, that’s enough of that, happy new year dweebs!

November 2022

Started off the month by messing around with this skull from May 2022 in clip studio.

Can’t remember who recommended the [AA] Gel Pen on twitter but I’m loving the line, reminds me of MUJI Gel Ink pens.

Some pencils and a bonus skull that didn’t make it onto last months page.

Skull and bones

I’ve been slowly adding to this page in clip studio during breaks at work. Mostly drawn using the default g-pen with some texture/tone here and there.

Batman Day 2022

A quick page for #BatmanDay sketched in Procreate. Someday I’ll draw a grumpy Jim Gordon fan comic and maybe include Bane and the Bat fella.

Holidaaaay

I left the iPad at home and took a wee sketchbook on holiday to fill a few pages. I’ve been wanting to get back to drawing on paper again and it felt pretty good to ditch the undo gesture for a bit.

Here’s the raw inks:

Picked up a new pen from empik and a copy of RELAX #38 from the airport. Really impressed with the production and large format of RELAX, astounding work from Jakub Rebelka, Philippe Cazaumayou, etc.

Colour it in

I coloured day 2 of PJ Holden’s brilliant holiday comics for the craic:

I flatted the page pretty quickly earlier in the week before adding rendering over the last few days at work. I had about 10 to 30 minutes during my breaks and lunches giving me approximately 10 minutes per panel.

Kinda like PJ’s genius pomodoro technique (which breaks single tasks into 25 minute chunks) 10 minutes is a pretty perfect time limitation to set for a single panel, really keeps you focused.

PJ has collected his holiday comics along with a bunch of other strips on gumroad (it’s pay what you like) and I really enjoyed it!

I’ve uploaded my flats here if you wanna colour the page too.

What’s updog?

Declan Shalvey recently posted this panel from his creator owned comic Old Dog starting an inking challenge on twitter:

It’s been fascinating to watch the various approaches to this single panel and I couldn’t help but think of 99 ways to tell a story when I saw each new interpretation throughout the past week or so.

Anyway, it’s been getting a wee bit quiet here on the blog so thought I’d post up my attempt in pencils from a few nights ago.

Old Dog is out on Aug 31 Sept 28 and looks great so be sure to check out issue zero and subscribe to Dec’s newsletter.

May 2022

Yikes, it’s the end of the month so I’m clearing out the auld iPad to free up some of those precious megabytes.

#AlienDay happened again, apparently its an annual thing.

Some more heads and a bat fella.

Thumbs up

Just tweaking a thumbprint brush I created in CSP along with some other inking tests.

This is a tribute!

Liam Sharp recently posted this awesome tribute to Deaths Head II and 90s comics on his twitter:

I simply couldn’t resist colouring the first page and settled on a muted palette with an added paper texture overlay to give it that vintage 90s Marvel UK feel.

I’ve uploaded my flats here if you wanna give it a go.