Garry Brown - "This is Anderson's Boomstick!"

Yet ANOTHER cover Débutante this week! Garry Brown is an insanely talented Scottish artist with an outstanding sense of design. A recently graduating from the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, Garry has been making a big splash producing stunning covers for Boom! Studios Incorruptible series as well as working for a host of other comic publishers.

Not one to be left out, the Mighty Tharg has commissioned Garry to produce some 2000AD covers. The first is this brilliant Cadet Anderson one, for which Garry posted a breakdown of the cover process on his Deviantart site.

I've chopped the image up so we can fully appreciate each step. Over to Garry "1 - One of 3 layouts I emailed to the editor. The cover was to involve PSI Judge Anderson in her rookie days. I actually did all 3 layouts in my moleskin sketchbook at ECCC this year. Anyway, this is the one the editor chose to go with."

He continues "2 - Normally my process would be to print that out full size then put tracing paper on top of it and work out the anatomy/details. BUT, i recently got a cintiq 21ux (Lucky git! -Pete), so i get to do it all digitally now so I simply took it into PS and added a layout above then draw out the anatomy."

"3 - Next layer above to make sure i have everything i need details wise (except the hand for some reason.)"

The image is looking stunning right now, which leads us onto a little Garry rant! "4 - I wanted to show this because I have been accused in the past and present of being a 'when in doubt black it out' guy. Not the case. I draw everything out and then used to add another tracing paper layer above it and roughly ink out the shadows. As stated above, I do this digitally now."


"5 - I then blueline print it out on comic board and ink it traditionally. I don't think I'll ever ink digitally, I like the randomness of natural inks." I can certainly see Garry's point here. While I love a nice clean digitally created image there's something raw and exciting about good, old fashioned ink!

"6 - THIS IS NOT THE FINAL COVER. I did this by accident. It's pretty much the trapping layer moved above the lineart layer. I thought it looked cool so I sent it off to the editor as I continued to colour the cover in a more traditional style. It took about 3 minutes to do this red version, sent it off to a buddy for his take on it, then he said, 'kind of looks like a Dave Johnson cover for 100 Bullets.' Turns out it IS the same style of colouring for issue 78 of 100 Bullets. So that was that. Wasn't going to use it. Still worth showing I think. It was after all part of the process and I almost finished colouring a cover in 3 minutes, nice!"
That 100 Bullets cover for ya...

However, the final art has the magnificent blue/purple colour scheme shown below.

Garry says "I had already sent the red version to the editor but I didn't like it. I went ahead and coloured the second version. I always had a strong blue and white colour scheme in mind for it so it all went relatively quickly."

Once again, the design team at 2000AD have done a great job with the image, with Pye Parr versatile logo design rocking the blue and white dynamic of the original image. Brilliant!

Thanks to Garry for his wonderful input (look out for a cooool future Dredd cover from him on his Deviantart site!) You can find his website here where I urge you to look lovingly at his Incorruptible covers and his Batman cover.

I look forward to seeing lots more from this superb artist!