Jon Davis-Hunt - A Bonny (and Clyde) Cover!

Wow! What a fantastic, action-packed wraparound cover for this months' Megazine by the truly wonderful Jon Davis-Hunt! I love all the little details in this image and one or two message boarders are going to be very happy when they see the finished image!

As ever, Jon has been kind enough to send a detailed breakdown of each and every step, so over to him to tell you more...

"This was the initial sketch I worked up from a thumbnail I sent Tharg. The thumbnail itself is frankly appalling so I haven't included it here. : )" What a wimp! - Pete.

"Anyway, it got across to Tharg the concept of the cover which was the important thing - I really wanted to have this very high-octane, kinetic scene with some Juves escaping from a bank-job, not realising that Dredd is simply waiting for them to fly by. I really wanted to try and capture that 'Holy shit..' moment as realisation dawned on the face of the escaping Juve that he's about to get hi-exe'd!"

"In the original I had the escaping juves driving a hover car. On sketching out this rough however, I realised that my dimensions were wildly off in my thumbnail and so substituted the car for a bike, as the former just wouldn't fit. However, I think it's kind of cool that the bad-guys are on a bike, which mirrors Dredd's parked Lawmaster."

"I then inked the main characters. I had to shrink Dredd slightly from my original sketch, just to ensure that he was a comfortable fit for the front cover and to make sure he wasn't interfering with the Megazine logo too much.

I also added the extra character onto the back of the hover-bike, just to make the back-cover shot more dynamic and to balance out the bike. I decided to make the 2nd juve a girl, and imagined them as a kind of Mega-City version of Bonny and Clyde!"

Jon continues "I then inked in the background. I used Mr Ben Willsher's design for the Lawmaster as I think it looks so god damn cool in the Prog, but I gave it a set of retro lights from the old Lawmaster, just because I thought they might look sweet."

"I then flatted in the colours for the characters. I went with a bright red for the hover-bike to act as a sharp contrast to Dredd's Lawmaster. When I flat, I tend to use quite de-saturated colours as I like then going more saturated later..." The bright red bike also has a look of Akira's bike, which we all know Jon loves!

"Next I added in all the shadows and highlights. I spent a fair bit of time on the hover-bike, adding grime and decals to give it a really 'used' look, so you feel like these guys have been pulling jobs on a regular basis." And just check out those decals, we seem to have a Worley sticker and a Buttonman one - are this twisted pair fans of a letter writing loony from Paisley!?!

"I then added in the background colours. I hadn't been able to decide what weather or time of day to do this at, but once I had chosen the red for the hover-bike, I knew I wanted to have a bright blue sky to set it against so that it would really pop out from the back-cover. I darkened down the area around Dredd to contrast and then started to add some shadowing and form to the buildings."

"Finally I lit the scene trying to take into account as many of the lights, screens and neon signs I had drawn in at random. : )

This took a little bit of time as I had stuff emitting light all over the place, but eventually (with some degree of artistic license) I managed to get everything sitting right on the page." Check out the graffiti too, nice to see our favourite podcasting couple get a mention!

Once again thanks to Jon for sending us such an amazing breakdown of an excellent, truly memorable cover! I can't wait till I've got this in my hands!