Luke Pearson's Blog, page 2
February 8, 2013
Dretches
A bunch of sketch pages (I wouldn’t call them sketchbook pages because my actual sketchbooks are endlessly boring) that were all a part of The Sketchbook Show. Click on them to make them needlessly massive. That last one is actually two pages smooshed together and it was drawn while watching Ridley Scott’s miserable Robin Hood film, so there are some embarrassing attempts at trying to draw Russell Crowe’s potatoey face in there. The second one down was drawn while I was watching War Horse. The little rabbit guy is Benedict Cumberbatch.
These were fun to do. It took me back to doing these kind of things, which looking back on them, look way more exciting to me than anything I’ve done in a long time.
January 28, 2013
Secret Prison 7 (NSFW)
NOTE: THIS COMIC IS NSFW.
Also it reads right to left, manga style. Click the image to read all four pages.
This comic appears in Secret Prison 7, published by Retrofit Comics. It was conceived as a tribute to the alternative manga anthology Garo, featuring contemporary western alt-ish cartoonists working in the ‘traditional right-to-left/newsprint/pulp-manga format’. It’s satisfyingly large at 10 x 13″, 150 pages and is full of cool people. It’s one of my favourite comics of last year for sure, even if I wasn’t it. There are some other full comics from it online from Angie Wang, James Harvey and Katie Skelly, that are all distinctly better than mine. Below is the front cover and back cover of the anthology, by Ryan Cecil Smith and Angie Wang.
I have mixed feelings about my own comic. There are a few panels in there that I feel are some of the best little bits of a comic I’ve ever done, but there are also some awful drawings, particularly of the main character whose design slips all over the place and exposes some of my drawing weaknesses. Also I’m not convinced that the comic isn’t altogether a bit icky and embarrassing.
Two years earlier I was in Secret Prison 2 with this comic.
Above is a flip-through of the comic by Box Brown.
You can buy a copy here.
January 25, 2013
I feel a bit lame putting this on my site, buuuutttt if you have the right kind of phone-like item and you’re into that sort of thing you could follow me on Instagram as thatlukeperson. Or look at all my pictures online here. I post a lot of work in progress and sketchbook stuff that doesn’t get seen elsewhere. But not too much. I promise there are no photos of my meals (except this cool potato).
Note my Friend of Oily Comics card drawn by Charles Forsman, a sneaky look at Loin des Yeux (the French edition of Everything We Miss) and Philippa Rice giving the now deceased snow mage a kiss.
New York Times
This is a small piece for The New York Times letters page. It accompanied a letter titled Invitation to a Dialogue: Rebuild the House, which you can read here. It puts forward the idea of reducing the average size of Congressional districts from 710,000 to 100,000. This would increase membership of the House of Representatives from 435 to about 3100, the benefit of this being that “these men and women would owe their seats more to the reputation they enjoyed within their community and less to the half-truths and misinformation put out by slick mass media campaigns paid for by the big-money interests.”
Philippa Rice made this GIF to demonstrate the funny face I hid in it.
This is another NYT piece I did last year for a letter titled Sunday Dialogue: Schools for Rich and Poor. You can read that one here.
Ahuizotl
I noticed I never pointed out that all 12 pages of this comic are online now. So here it is. It’s a couple of years old now and it shows in places, but I’m still pretty pleased with some of the stuff in here, particularly all those trees and the creature itself (the design of which is based on/stolen from Tezuka’s weird dog police cars from Astro Boy.) It also features what I still believe to be the best panel I’ve ever drawn.
You can either read it online over at spera-comic.com (where you can read other stuff featuring the same characters and world, including the ongoing story Glass Flowers, other stand-alone shorts like mine or the original online collaboration which I also contributed to some time ago) or you can click on the image above to read through it right here.
October 8, 2012
Hilda and The Bird Parade
Hilda and The Bird Parade, my third Hilda book (second album sized one) is available to pre-order now! If you’re interested.
It’s a 40 page hardback book. Here are some little previews for now:
September 19, 2012
The Manual
This illustration appears in The Manual Issue #3, accompanying an article by Duane King. I also did little portraits of all the contributing writers but I’m not posting them here because I don’t like them that much.
August 15, 2012
You Mustn’t Be Afraid
My contribution to Nobrow 7: Brave New World. Please click a page to make it big and click through to read the whole thing.
I’m choosing to display it in black and white here, because that’s how I prepared the artwork and I’m quite fond of the way it looks. In the actual book however, (which you can buy here) it’s printed in a nice blue. Which you can see below.
August 2, 2012
Guardian Weekend
I did this comic for The Guardian for a section called ‘A Cartoonist’s Worldview’.
Here it is next to some stairs.
The contributor list was made up of some of my favourite cartoonists going so I was pretty excited about getting to take part. It included Stephen Collins, Kate Beaton, Lilli Carré (you should read her book The Lagoon, it’s one of my favourite comics), Gabrielle Bell (I think her one might have been the best), Tom Gauld, Ivan Brunetti, Nicholas Gurewitch and Modern Toss. You can read all of them over on the Guardian website, right here.
Also, a big thanks to Becky Barnicoat for helping make it happen. She draws great comics and should have been in it as well.
May 11, 2012
Who is Rupert Ray?
A drawing I did for the exhibition ‘Who is Rupert Ray?’, an exhibition for the launch of ‘Rupert Ray’, a new agency founded by Alex Maclean and Caroline Matthews, both previously of Airside. A bunch of artists answered that very question by doing portraits of said character, a bio of whom can be found in their ‘about’ section.
My Rupert is a kind of old eccentric, posing in his studio with all the cool stuff he’s acquired over the years. There were some real illustration badasses in the lineup including Jean Jullien, Adrian Johnson, Dick Hogg, Pete Fowler and tons more which you can see here.
Please click the picture for full size, because it looks a lot cooler that way.
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