ABOUT

A personal project in the shape of my take on a birthday card. Celebrating the old man's 70th needs more than a token gesture from Clinton's.

Long story short, I've always drawn cards for birthdays. More of a personal touch especially when I place the old man in the thick of the action. So for his 70th, as befitting the occasion, I wanted to do something fairly big, a piece of work I could get printed and framed. After toying with a few ideas I settled on the comic book cover idea having created a Planet of the Apes version for his 60th.

My Dad and I share similar interests in movies, sci-fi and that sort of thing and zombies is definitely one of those interests, though he's more of a George A. Romero guy to my Rick Grimes. So Zombies it was and what better comic cover to create than one for The Walking Dead?

I wanted to make the cover as much of an homage to TWD books and of Charlie Adlard's artwork, so I began by finding a herd scene from TWD #162, vectorising the pages, removing the zombies that I wanted and then customising the landscape layout to suit my portrait aspect composition. The selected zombies were then inserted into the page to create the foreground of the composition.

Next up, the van and the figures on top (My dad with the saw, me with the axe). The van was created in Illustrator and the figures in Photoshop, staying as true to Adlard's style as possible whilst adding a bit of my own styling to the faces. The van and figures where inserted into the cover to form the mid ground and focal point and surrounded by silhouettes of clawing hands to add further depth and increase the sense of danger.

With the black and white artwork complete, the colouring began again stying faithful to the cover styling with broad strokes, flat colour and the occasional gradient. Over which was thrown a liberal dose of gore...

The finishing touches including the page furniture so as the image logo and issue number, artists credits and sign off. TWD log was added last, colouring it blood red and plastering it with more gore to keep up the theme. Finally a cityscape background was dropped in with a alftone treatment to add depth and perspective to the composition whilst not distracting from the main action area.

Artwork complete, the cover was printed off as an A1 poster and presented to a happy father on his 70th. Now what am I going to do for 80....