My first experience of HG Wells' 'The War of the Worlds' was via Jeff Wayne's musical version.
I would have been around 10 or 11 years old. The combination of Richard Burton's narration, the music, the other-worldly sound effects was - to me - utterly compelling.
Then there was the album artwork: not only the front cover, but also the fantastic illustrations in the booklet that came with the vinyl. I'd seen Star Wars not long before (it opened in the UK a year after it did in the USA), so was very much on a sci-fi high.
The end result was the pre-teen me becoming somewhat obsessed with 19th / early 20th century Sci-fi literature. Soon after I added 19th / Early 20th century ghost / horror stories, & these are things that have stuck with me ever since.
There have been many adaptations of 'TWotW', but none - so far as I know - that pitched the whole interplanetary conflict as a terrible miscommunication, stemming from the human desire to blow things up, & the Martian vocabulary being apparently limited to shouting 'Ulla!'
That was my idea for a shortish comic-book story, which had been bouncing around my head for a couple of years.
This Fighting Machine illustration was my first effort creating the visual style, though it was actually
made to be sold at a university auction to raise some cash for our end-of-degree show.
The story idea is still clanging about inside my brain, backed up with some notes, & very rough thumbnail sketches. One day ...
These are some of the initial pencil sketches & page designs vs the final pages of a biography of Leon Trotsky, that I made as part of a university project. I've posted them here in order to show that creating work in a digital format is not the same the same thing as asking a computer to do the work.
Speaking with people over the past months, there does seem to be some confusion regarding the overlap between digital art, & AI-generated images, which is a little troubling.
For clarification: they are not the same thing.
My jump to digital has been a relatively recent thing. I've been drawing for 50+ years, but only learned how to use Photoshop during my Art Foundation course, around 15 years ago.
It's a way more convenient way for me to compile my more complex pieces, plus it allows me to incorporate photo-textures without it being an almighty faff.
But behind almost everything I create is a process that starts in a sketchbook, with some awful rushed thumbnails & hastily scrawled notes. That's how this shiny new website took shape (more on that in a little while). Around a third of the time it takes to create a Prog Poster is making notes on what I believe will translate well to a visual cue, sketching ideas, planning how it's all going to fit together, then redoing those plans over & over, until I'm finally happy to start.
Sketches, vs final images from my biography of Leon Trotsky.
These are a few of the sketchbook pages I've compiled while rejigging the website.
Mostly they are very quick, very loose, doodles that act as a memory jogger.
I'm a man of a certain age, & my recall isn't as great as it once was.
Committing my ideas to paper (even the very bad ones, of which there are many)
means I don't have to struggle to try to remember them all. Plus, they provide me with a
template on which I can build a (hopefully) better idea.
