Neil Roberts - Gurnzilla!

Oh wow, I've been dying to get my hands on this cover for ages! I absolutely love it! If you didn't already know, it's Neil 'The Gurner' Roberts' cover from Megazine 326.

Here's Neil to tell us how it was made "Here's my cover for this months Judge Dredd Megazine, Issue 326 – 'Big Trouble in Hondo City!'"

The brief was as follows: "A giant rampaging monster roaring, destruction all around, with Inaba and Junko small by comparison in the foreground on their Hoverbikes, facing him down..."

I gathered a few reference materials (sorry no gurning pictures, Pete), mainly the fantastic 80's Kaiju posters, posters by Norivishi Ohrai and others..."

I'm gutted! This article simply isn't the same without some of Neil's trademark gurning photos! I fully imagined him rampaging round his children's bedroom, smashing up their toys whilst growling his wife! All for his art!

However, Neil did send some of the posters that had inspired him below:

Godzilla Smush!

"As always, I started with a thumbnail, or thumbnails in this case, which were sent to Tharg for approval/revisions. Tharg liked the second one, which had more interaction on the image, which always makes for a dynamic cover. I might add that I didn't use any reference photos this time as I wanted to keep this strictly fantastical affair – I just wanted to try painting my way out of any problems on this one."

Even Neil's thumbnails are cool!

Neil continues "After that, we jump a few stages (namely blowing up the pic in Photoshop and painting over it in finer detail – and then painting A BIT MORE) on to the final piece."

 "Up from the Depths, Thirty stories high! Breathing fire, His head up in the sky! Gurnzilla! Gurnzilla! Gurnzilla! It's Neil Roberts!"

 

 Neil finishes "So, feel free to go and buy a copy, support your homegrown comic publishers, writers and artists, enjoy their stories and then buy the next issue!"

And below, we have the version of the cover with the logos, text etc, to see how the design team dealt the image.

Massive, massive thanks to Neil for sending the images and fascinating commentary. As I said at the start of this article, I really love this cover it's definitely a contender the cover of the year in my book. Please visit Neil's blog at skinnyelbows.blogspot.co.uk