Story of Joseph - working diary

At long last, at 11am Oct 31st, I completed and delivered the 23 pages of full colour lettered art that comprised The Story Of Joseph for Bible Society. I'm told some people deliver a job like this every month. All I can say is I'd seriously need to streamline my working methods to manage that on a regular basis.

I have loved drawing this project, as I have my previous strips for Bible Society, and look forward to seeing them in print. But making this workload fit around the rest of my schedule is quite a shenanigans. As it is I have two other art jobs - a Christmas card for Laurence and a CD cover for the SofT podcast, both of which should also be finished by today's deadline and both of which have a way to go yet. So why is this all taking me so long?  Three reasons primarily, Socks, schools, and the office, out of which I was supposed to move today.

Gerry, my landlord, gave me two months notice when I'd returned from Edinburgh, on the 1st of September, so I should have been out by now. But look at my calendar since then.

Sept 10 - 16th was Heather's exhibition. During this time, as co-invigilator, I wrote the script for Joseph.
I've done days at schools in North Lincs (2 days), Avonmouth, Furze Down, Sutton Coldfield, & Manchester.
Oct 8 - 17th I was in Denmark with the Socks, where I pencilled and inked most of Joseph.
Socks gigs have also taken me to Swindon, Lydford, Canterbury, Redhill, and Tetbury.
I've also made a number of visits to Kibworth to visit Mum in The Knoll care home, where I'm happt to report she's making good progress and has been drawing a bit of late.

So in this whole 2 months I've been able to manage about seven days clearing out the office and loading it into storage and, to be honest, you wouldn't think I'd done a thing. There is so much still to do that I've had to beg Gerry for another fortnight in which to do it (while also finishing the artwork on my desk). So, before I rush on, let's look at the breakdown of how long Joseph actually took to do.

Script - 23 pages written and laid out Sept 10 - 14 (average 4.6 pages per day)
Art - 23 pages pencilled & inked Sept 26 - 28, Oct 9 - 18 (average 2 pages per day)
Colouring - 23 pages coloured Oct 21 - 31 (average 2.5 pages per day)

So, were I to do nothing but this for a living (and dear reader I once did that, many moons ago) I could produce a 23 page comic every 28 days. If that eventuality comes, the first thing I shall be delegating is the colouring. Now, back to work.

Colouring Joseph

Having pencilled and inked my 23 page Joseph story for Bible Society (I referred to it as a 23 page graphic novel on Facebook, at which Gordon Rennie pointed out that that's what we call a comic) now I have the task of colouring it all.

It's a strange thing that, after thirty years working as a professional comic artist - and we must have passed that anniversary at some point recently as I had my first work in Oink in 1987 then had my first work accepted by Gas magazine in 1988 and went full time freelance in the summer of 1989 - I still lack confidence in certain areas. The writing I feel most confident about, but even then I don't do enough of it regularly to feel that I'm as good as I could be. I feel awkward about my artwork. I like my humorous style, and I know I'll never be the draughtsmen that I grew up admiring. But it's the colouring about which I am most concerned.

Back in the day, when I was doing colour pages every month for The Damage and others, I used to use water colour and magic markers and started to feel I knew what I was doing. I even painted pages in goache, god help me. Took ages. Since I've had access to Photoshop, which I think came with the Mac I acquired in 1998 (so, another anniversary) I've been entirely self taught, and never sure that I'm doing things as well as I could. So I put a shout out on Facebook to see if anyone had top tips. A few came in.

One thing I was obsessing about was Flatting, which all the colourists of US comics seem to do. So I did it for the example you see on this page. Does it make things quicker? I'm not sure. I've ended up working with a mixture of my previous method, and a couple of techniques like flatting, consistent use of a purple shadow layer, and this time I've decided against selecting and colouring outlines, which I spent a lot of time on in previous strips. Let's see how we get on shall we? Meantime, here are some of the tips that came in on Facebook.

Nigel Auchterlounie First have b&w line art on top layer set to multiply locked. A copy of that under to colour. Fill an empty layer with a base colour inbetween. Set that to multiply and merge with the bottom line art copy. This should give you 2 layers. Line art and a copy under that's coloured with one colour. This means anything you miss will still have a colour. Fill gutters and eyes and teeth white. Then all skin tones. Colour things that have to be a particular colour first. Then you're not colouring a jumper green then realising you have to change it because they're standing in front of a green bush. That's all I got. Good luck.

Andrew Dodd The line work I right click the magic wand and select the black in the line art first, creating a black layer that uses the line art as a mask, this can help later when changing the colour of the lines. I block all the colours in and on a separate layer add a hue and saturation layer as a mask for the shadows. This means that if I change any of the colours, the shadow changes with it. Background on it's own colour, characters on their's.

Gordon Rennie “...a 23 page graphic novel...”
Don’t we just call them ‘comics’?

Jamie Smart I don’t do all that flatting stuff I’ve never understood it. I do similar to Nigel’s method, I’ll put 4 b+w pages all on one page and go through dropping one colour in, then repeat with a different colour, etc etc. My Wacom’s super helpful to with its shortcut buttons, so my left hand is clicking between wand and painter while my right hand is picking the colours. Good luck with it all!

Chris Okse Oxenbury I discovered this Kev , https://www.ayalpinkus.nl/Flatton.html It creates flats and that .

Kev Sutherland Thanks to Okse for directing me to Flatton. Not sure how useful it'll be, until I can give it a colour guide. Here's my first use of it...

Kev Sutherland But you know, at a push I could live with this for a random panel where colour matching didn't matter(same panel after two minutes tweaking)

UPDATE: Sunday 21st Oct, page 10 coloured
Mon Oct 22 - pages 2 - 4 coloured
Tues Oct 23 - pages 1, 5 - 6 coloured
Weds Oct 24 - pages 7 - 9 coloured
Thurs Oct 25 - Page 11 coloured, then off to Socks gig in Canterbury
Sat Oct 27 - page 21 coloured
Sun Oct 28 - page 22 coloured
Mon Oct 29 - 11.45am p 23 coloured. 1.57pm p 20 coloured. 4.58pm p 12 coloured.
Tues Oct 30 - 7.50am p13. 10.27am p14. 12.15 p15. 3.15pm p16. 5.15pm p17. 9pm p18. Six pages in a day, only one to go!
Weds Oct 31 - page 19, final page, coloured and whole comic delivered & invoiced 11am. Hoorah!



Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - email for details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video here. 

Socks tour of Denmark

Thanks to Tommy Neilsen for this shot of the Socks in concert in Kjellerup on the penultimate night of our 9 night tour. Yes, I thought the light was a bit purpley. Regardless, it was the best night yet.

And thanks indeed to Tommy for organising this whole tour. I don’t think anyone’s organised such a successful tour run for us before. Nine consecutive nights, five nights in different small towns giving them our specially written Brexit show, and four nights in Aarhus giving them our Superheroes show. And every night has been excellent (at time of writing we still have to play Uldum, so there’s still scope for it going tits up at the end, but fingers crossed).

The Brexit shows have EU funding because of their partly educational component, and as a result are all done for a flat fee, plus my travel and accommodation is covered. The four Superheroes shows are being done for a small guarantee and a door split which, having had one sellout, and two shows at 75% full (in a 50 seater, the smallest crowd being fifteen), we’ll have done alright on those too.

The Brexit shows - in the library in Silkeborg, a pub theatre in Svendborg, a community arts centre in Ebeltoft, a converted cinema in Kjellerup and (to come) a high school in Uldum -  have been free to the public, so we had no idea how many would be there until it kicked off. Surprisingly, for 8pm on a weekday night, we’ve had great turnouts of around 30 per show, with our final night having a guaranteed sitting-duck crowd of maybe 100. Tommy has introduced us each time - entirely in Danish, so I’ve no idea what he said and, on the first night, didn’t even realise it was time for us to start cos he hadn’t ended by saying our name (I just thought it was a really long pause) - and three of the shows have been rounded off by a talk from the local candidate from the Labour Party.

So what have I given them, in my brand new hour long specially-written Brexit show? Well, before you start thinking I can turn out a brand new hour of comedy gold on any theme at short notice, I’m sorry to disappoint, but the show actually comprises a lot of stuff from other shows, wrapped around the new themed stuff. The running order is:

Intro gags and I’m A Sock song

The Killing - done in Denmark in 2012

Doublets & Ruffs - from 2016’s Shakespeare (with Danish additions, eg CBBC has become Ramashang. This & Forbrydelsen are the only Danish references which get a laugh)

Brexit Word Association - NEW

Travel gags - from 2010’s On The Telly

Walk On Wild Side - from 2008’s Return

Magic - from Telly

UKIP Song - from 2014’s And So Am I

Nigel Farage routine - NEW

An Actor Prepares - from Shakespeare

Insults - from Shakespeare

F Up Some Shakespeare - from Shakespeare

Farage on Immigration - NEW

Stereotypes - from And So Am I

Eurovision Routine - NEW

Gary Barlow Eurovision Song - NEW (done on Youtube 2017)

Farage persuades public - NEW

Richard III (first part) - from Shakespeare

Break up & All By Myself song - from Return, as redone for 2018’s Superheroes

Theresa May - NEW

Sweary Poppins - from Return

So there you have it. A show with routines which help tell the story, but are also tried and tested, and with a lot of incidental Shakespeare in. But, as you’ll know if you’ve seen those routines, the point of them is not their Shakespearian content but the conflict between the two Socks, so they worked very well. The audiences have loved it. The whole show got a rewrite after the first night, inevitably, with the order changing, and some new material coming in. But after night two we stuck with the same structure, and the adlibs built around the lines, as they always do as a show beds in.

After three nights of Brexit, we then had a four night run at Teater Katapult in Aarhus, giving them our hour long Superheroes show, as performed at Edinburgh. In fact we gave them a 75 minute show, because that’s what it said in the programme (something I’d clearly agreed to on the phone, not a problem). The simple insertion of Michael Jackson’s Earth Song in the middle, and the addition of Sweary Poppins at the end, and suddenly the show is 75 minutes long.

To begin with I didn’t remove or translate any gags, deciding to run them past the Danish audience and get humour from what worked and what didn’t. Jokes that had to go or change included:

Bob Kane - Bobbing up and down doesn’t mean anything in Danish

Motion Capture - Jobby had to be translated to Hoondepude, which then got the laugh every time

Dinner dinner dinner dinner Batman - This reference didn’t mean anything because, although they’d seen the 1960s Batman series, they don’t call dinner dinner. Got laughs discovering and commenting on this.

Degrasse Tyson - The kneel / Neil pun didn’t register

Scottish Superheroes - For the record Oor Wullie is even less well known in Denmark than in England, and Guardians Of The Deep Fried Galaxy Bar was two cultural references too far

Irn Bru Man - Irn Bru took a lot of explaining, which was luckily fun

Thanos - We had to keep in a pun about Thanos sounding like “Tha knows” in a Yorkshire accent. This also took a lot of explanation, giving us an excuse to go on about Danish pronunciation, which went very well.

Harley and Ivy - manure became fertiliser, DEFRA had to go

… and the rest of the show worked well, with me realising just how many good visual gags we had, and how universal Marvel & DC superheroes are. The Brother came across well purely as a visual and a relationship, with his Cockney Rhyming Slang, which was lost on everyone, working on its rhythm more than its actual content.

The Superheroes show got better every night, ending on a high with Sunday’s show. We also sold 5 copies of the Superheroes comic (having only brought 10, that was not bad).

I’ve also managed to make great use of my daytime by pencilling and inking the 23 page Joseph strip I’m doing for Bible Society. You can see a record of my progress in this blog here. So all in all a jam packed, and slightly knackering, ten days away from home.

If anyone wants to book the Socks for international dates, we’ve got the skills to fit the bill. We’re getting good at tweaking our wordplay to appeal to foreigners with English as a second language. And if anyone wants a themed show, we seem to do quite well in cherry-picking from our ten previous shows and sticking it all together to a coherent end.

Thanks again Tommy, this has been fun. Come on Uldum, let’s go out with a bang.

PS: Update, Uldum went well too.

Drawing in my hotel room

Thanks to the marvels of bluetooth and cloud technology, I'm getting a lot of these random photos turning up on my laptop, with me in daft poses pulling stupid faces. Why could this be, you ask? It's because they've transferred to my computer from my phone before I've been able to erase them. And why have I taken them in the first place? Because Joseph.

If you look closely you'll see the hands from the above photo were what I used as reference for the first picture on this page of Joseph, the 23 page graphic novel I've written and am drawing for Bible Society. My deadline of the end of October looms ever close, meaning every spare moment in my hotel room has to be spent drawing. I also have, on my to do list, a drawing for the sleeve of a podcast CD and a rather elaborate Christmas card with 87 different drawings on it! Bloody hell Baldrick!

Working hunched over the little glass table in my hotel room is not, I'm sure, doing my spine any good. In fact I can feel some twinges and look forward to getting back to my drawing board next week, but at least this hotel has a table, and indeed very good light. So onwards and upwards.

Here, purely for my benefit, is a log of what I've drawn so far:

Script written during Hev's exhibition and sent to Rachel, my editor, Fri Sept 14.
Script amends delivered Sept 20
By Weds Sept 26 Pages 1 - 3 pencilled & inked, p4 pencilled
Sept 26 - Fri Oct 5 Pages 4 - 10 pencilled & inked before Denmark (with a few days off to put boxes in storage).
Oct 9 - 12 (in Denmark) Pages 11 - 15 pencilled
Quarter past midnight Oct 12th, Page 15 inked, 11 - 15 borders & bubbles inked, & one panel on each page inked. After a very good Socks Superheroes gig in Aarhus, might I add.

UPDATE: Sat Oct 13, 4 pages inked before lunchtime.
Page 16 pencilled between lunchtime and 5pm show, and inked by 9.20pm. Approx 4 hrs total.
Sun Oct 14, page 17 pencilled by 10.30am, then off to see Aros art gallery.
2pm - 3.15, page 18 pencilled.
7pm - 9.30, page 19 pencilled (I'm a lot slower in the evenings)
Mon Oct 15, page 20 pencilled by midday. Page 21 pencilled by 12.50 - fastest page yet!
2pm - 3.30, page 22 pencilled. Only one page left!
4.45 - Yes! Page 23, the final page, pencilled! Just in time for me to go off to tonight's Socks gig at 5pm.
Tues Oct 16, 3 pages inked between 9am and 4.15pm. So each page takes 2.33333 recurring hours to ink.
4.15 - 4.55/ 10.30 - 11.15pm a fourth page inked, finishing after the final Denmark Socks gig.
Weds Oct 17, 10am one more page inked, have to check out in an hour, so that'll be my lot
WOW! 11am - checked out having got another page inked!!

So my final Denmark work rate was...
Oct 9 - 12 - 5 pages pencilled
Oct 13 - 1 page pencilled, 5 pages inked
Oct 14 - 3 pages pencilled
Oct 15 - 4 pages pencilled
Oct 16 - 4 pages inked (3 still to ink)
Oct 17 - 2 pages inked (only 1 to go)

Allowing for a trip to Manchester and Bodelwyddan next weekend, and three days gigging on the 25th - 27th, I have 6 more drawing days left in October when I get home. And that's if I delay moving out of my office. Oh yes, and all 23 pages need colouring. God, the agony of being busy with comic art for once in my life!

Oh yes, and I do have to prepare and perform a comedy show every night here in Denmark, which in the case of the first three gigs has involved up to 4 hours travelling each day. Sigh. I tell you one thing I don't have time for, fannying about writing this bloody blog!

Facebook trivia roundup

During a busy month of drawing comics, clearing out the office, then gigging for ten days in Denmark, I've still found time to write trivial nonsense on Facebook. Here's some of it.

Got to move out of the office, so putting my worldly (workly) goods in storage. Made a start yesterday. But blimey norah you build up quite the mountain of crap when you've been around this long, with a tendency to keep everything.

Every time I pack a box I'm going through the whole "Do I need this? Will I ever read this again? Should I put it on eBay? Who has time for that, I'll put it in a box again" process. Yesterday, for example, I boxed up 15 years worth of Q magazines (starting with issue 8 if you're interested. And no, they're going in storage cos they won the "It'll be worth something someday" debate.)

Anyone else thrown out 30 years worth of shit / stroke / put it all in storage, recently?

I'm puzzled about this Joe Sugg chap (off of Strictly). It says on Wikipedia that he's the author of a graphic novel. It then says "the writing is by Matt Whyman, with artist Amrit Birdi". So which bit is he the author of?

I, as far as most kids I teach are concerned, am the author of The Beano, by the way.

There's a film on Talking Pictures TV called The Scamp, with a young Australian boy in the lead. Whatever happened to him, you wonder? The answer is brilliant...

http://www.brothersgibb.org/reports-colin-petersen.html

Bloody hell Baldrick! I've just found the worst feature of the new iPlayer design yet. When you've finished listening to one show, it plays you the start of a totally different one, from a station you never listen to!

I went from an episode of Counterpoint to the Radio 1 Breakfast Show, and now I've gone from an excellent documentary on 4 Extra to the morning show on Radio Leicester! Madness. (The above grab was from another occasion when it gave me a Welsh language show! It's also given me a Gaelic show. Madness.)

Jaws

When did you last watch Jaws? It's on Netflix and we watched it last night. Wow. It's a lesson in film making, and I can't imagine what it must have been like seeing it in 1975 when there hadn't been a film anything like it since Hitchcock more than a decade earlier. Exemplary.

You get touches of Hitchcock (eg the contra-zoom), bits of Mike Nichols (the realistic dialogue in deep-focus shots), and a few bits of Buster Keaton (the comic timing where you think you're safe, then you think you're in danger, then you're not, then you are). Then you get bits that are pure Spielberg (the end of the pier turns round in the water and starts chasing you and so many more).

If he didn't invent the techniques he uses, and he often did, Spielberg brought them back into use after years of neglect, and with Jaws set the mould for the modern action film that is still our expectation today. Everything from Pirates of the Caribbean to The Lego Movie can trace its stylistic origins to this movie.

It’s not Wagon Wheels that got smaller, it was the NME.

It’s only while chucking them out of my office I’ve realised the NME kept shrinking by an inch every couple of years right up until I, and everyone else, stopped getting it. Probably cos it was hidden behind some Wagon Wheels.

(The photo’s not clear, but the 1998 copies are 40cm tall, the 2008 ones are 30cm. )

In response to Vince's post asking for bands named after insects I wrote:

I am so pleased with my pathetic contribution to this thread, I couldn't resist sharing it. So, how many bands named after insects can you think of?

I got (with a bit of Googling, admittedly):
The Roaches
The Cockroaches
Moth
Bugs
Caterpillar
Centipedes
The Termites
Earwig
Silverfish
Scarab
Larva
Silkworm
WASP
B Bumble & The Stingers
The Butterfly Effect
Bee Band
Tse Tse Fly
WORM
Flat Worms
Insect Warfare
White Moth Black Butterfly
Alien Ant Farm
and Papa Roach

Your turn.

I'm currently in Aarhus in Denmark, and from my window can see Some Kind Of Tower. Last night I performed in the Cobblestone Alley area, tonight I think I'm near Crates & Cranes.

Earlier this year I was in Hannover which has the most Postcardy Old Town, made up from the few non-bombed pre-war buildings, which have all been moved from where they used to be, to create a square that looks like a quasi old town. At least here in Denmark they had the good sense to just be collaborators and so not get bombed to buggery by the Brits.

Happiness is managing to get proper comic strip drawing done on the table in your hotel room #comics #myactualjob

Kev on The Apprentice

Of course I missed it cos I'm in Denmark, but if you want to see my brief appearance on The Apprentice last night, it's to be found here on iPlayer. (I can't make it work while I'm over here, and am wary of downloading dodgy VPN software while I'm here, just in case, so I'll see it when I get home next week). By all accounts I didn't disgrace myself. Thanks to Hev for the screengrab above.

"Awesome side eye from Kev Sutherland on The Apprentice there... 😄 " - Sarah Niblock via Facebook""

Thanks to John Freeman for the graphic above. Since he and Hev both grabbed the self same moment, I can guess my appearance was very much a cough and a spit. We recorded it back in May at the Beano Studios offices in London, with myself and Nigel Auchterlounie drawing the two comic strips, his for the girls team, mine for the boys. I have no idea how much made it onto screen. I leaked a tiny snippet in my blog at the time (when I was still keeping schtum). Here's more of the Benji Saves The Day, as snapped on the day.

Looking at the art again, I far prefer my scribbles, drawn while they were talking, to the finished line art which I did on the wrong type of paper with the wrong pen (all my bad choices) so it looked very weak. I'm betting Nigel's was a much stronger line drawing.

UPDATE: I found the whole episode on Youtube, put up rather randomly by someone within a day of broadcast. My bit is indeed a cough and a spit, and the tiniest glimpse we get of the pages shows that they look fine. The respective quality of Nigel's and my art also had no bearing whatsoever on the result of the task. Here's the little I managed to snap:

The comments online have been nice, here's a taste.

John Freeman's Down The Tubes review

Jamie Smart ‏ @jamiesmart
.@KevFComicArtist and @spleenal on #Theapprentice2018! Bloody heroes

Ric Lumb ‏ @PuttyCAD
The only super heroes in this episode of #TheApprentice 😂👍

Whytrig MiddleSchool ‏ @WhytrigMS
Think we might have spotted @KevFComicArtist on @bbcapprentice tonight. We recognised the braces!

Vince ‏ @VinceStadon
Once a year I turn on my telly, and there, unexpectedly, is @KevFComicArtist. feel haunted.

PJ Holden @ COMIC CITY! ‏ Verified account @pauljholden
It’s @KevFComicArtist because of course it is! #theapprentice

𝕄𝕒𝕥 ✎ ‏ @InspiredMind5
Thought I recognised those braces! Congrats - great to see 😁

Jason Manly
No wonder you have fled the country Kev Sutherland 😀 ‏

Ben Morton ‏ @MidBoulevard
Hear hear! Fantastic work all around 😁 You all smashed it regardless! 😃

ComicScene UK Magazine ‏ @comicsflixukus
Should have had the sock puppets saying what it looks like you are really thinking! That would be great TV!

Bog Eyed Books ‏ @BogEyedBooks
Great to see @phoenixcomicuk and @BeanoOfficial on #Theapprentice2018! Well done @KevFComicArtist, your face said it all! #KidsLoveComics

Nigel Auchterlounie ‏
@spleenal
IN YOUR FACE @KevFComicArtist !!! 😃

Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - email for details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video here. 

Socks Go To Denmark

Well that's easy for you to say. Let's just hope everyone understands our Scottish accents as, starting tomorrow, we return to Denmark.

To be honest I can't remember whether we've been twice or three times before. Certainly I blogged a little about our visit to Aarhus in 2011, and it looks like the last time we went was October 2012 when the Socks took a version of Boo Lingerie to Aarhus and Copenhagen, sharing the bill with Andrew Vincent. That was when we shot a version of The Killing sketch, which went down great over there.

So now we're making our return, with a rather mind-blowing ten dates lined up. And the oddest thing about these dates is that, for 5 of them, our brief is to do a show about Brexit. At time of writing, ie the day before the first gig, I've written a show but not performed it yet, which includes new material they'll be seeing for the first time, threaded through the best of our Shakespeare show. It won't be until the first night that we'll be able to assess what works and what doesn't. So it's back to where we were in February when we first tested out Superheroes in Leicester.

The schedule looks like this:

8. Oct. Silkeborg, Campus Bindenslevs plads - Brexit show
9. Oct. Harders, Svendborg - Brexit show
10. Oct. Ebbeltoft, Det Gamle Posthus - Brexit show
11 - 14 Oct Katapult, Aarhus - Superheroes show
15. Oct. Kjellerup, Den Gamle Biograf - Brexit show
16. Oct. Uldum, Uldum Højskole kl - Brexit show

The Superheroes show, which we're doing for 5 nights at our familiar venue of Katapult, gives us the first chance to do the Edinburgh material since Edinburgh. And, to my surprise, re-reading the script I've found it to be even funnier than I'd remembered. As for the gags which won't mean anything to a Danish audience, that'll be what we discover from the 11th. I remember one of the biggest surprise doing Boo Lingerie in Aarhus in 2012 was the discovery that Charles Dickens is totally unfamiliar to Danish audiences. Let's see what they make of the references to Diddy David Hamilton, Hamilton Academicals, and Acker Bilk. Probably less than the audiences in Edinburgh did (and plenty of them didn't understand that bit... you know, I think I'm going to be replacing that bit, aren't I?)

(Our banner ad from 2012, just found in an old blog, loving it)