Leigh Gallagher - Chari-art!

Congratulations to the most handsome artdroid in the world, Leigh Gallagher who is currently celebrating his wedding to fiancée Niki. Hopeless romantics among you will remember Leigh's wonderful, very touching comic strip proposal, which you can revisit here. Get your hankies out now though!

As Leigh is busy erm... celebrating, he asked if I'd step in to show the cover process for his excellent Aquila cover for Prog 1797. Naturally, to reflect the mood of the female population now that he is legally unavailable, the artist chose the image of a distraught, angry woman to adorn this commemorative cover.

Below we see his cover rough, I love the energy and sense of motion in this image, so dynamic!   

 Chariot of Pieces!

With 'Cover Rough B' approved by the mighty one, Leigh refined the image with these beautiful pencils...

 Boadicea gets a strike!

Leigh tightens up those pencils with these incredible inks. Lovely design work here, it's great how everything seems to be exploding out towards the reader.

 Leading lines aplenty give this cover a great sense of motion!

And finally the painted cover. Leigh mentioned in his blog post for the cover of Prog 1793 that he is currently adding an ink wash to his work to add texture to the final image, it looks like he repeated the process here.

There are some lovely touches here, particularly the lighting effects and the dust clouds being kicked up by the horses, brilliant!

 Iceni-one still alive?

And here's how it looked on the prog, complete with awful tag line! I must say, part of the joy of doing this blog is thinking up the cheesy 'headline' and this one was a bugger, so hat's off to the 2000AD boys for 'Chariots of Ire!'

So there we have it, another dynamic, exciting cover courtesy of the brilliant, awfully dashing Mr Gallagher. A MASSIVE thanks as ever for sending me the images and good luck for the future Mr and Mrs G!