One of the things that daunted me about adapting The Cattle Raid of Cooley into comics was the number of animals I’d have to draw.  I’ve never really drawn animals before.  But as it goes on, I’ve discovered I rather enjoy it.  Here’s a sneak preview of some of the beasties I’ve been drawing in upcoming pages…

The Cattle Raid of Cooley, the next Ulster Cycle comic, is coming along nicely. I’m very aware of the fact that when my house got flooded last summer, there was a long break in updates, so I’ve decided to build myself a bit of a backlog before I start posting, and to post on a regular weekly or twice-weekly (I haven’t decided which yet) schedule rather than whenever I get a page done, so as to stay well ahead of myself.

If you’ve been following my blog since last June you may remember that I’ve been drawing The Ulster Cycle in red biro, but greyscaling it and turning up the contrast a bit to turn it into black and white art. Some of the people I’ve shown the original art to, including fellow creative types Malachy Coney and PJ Holden, have said they prefer it in red, and as I’m publishing it on the web there’s no need to accept the restrictions of print publication.

So I’ve decided to heed their wisdom. The Cattle Raid of Cooley will be published here in red, just the same as I draw it. I’m not going to post any of the art here until I’ve got enough of a backlog built up, but just to let you see how it’ll look I’ve rescanned page 59 from Ness (chosen because the art’s not bad and there’s no lettering to redo). The black and white version, for the sake of comparison, is here.

I should be getting back on track shortly. I’ve been running around between work, home and my dad’s house for the last couple of weeks and really had very little time for drawing. Or for thinking about the story, which is probably more important. I don’t have a script. I have a rough idea of the shape of the story, and I try to work a couple of scenes ahead in my head, with events coming into sharper focus the closer I get to drawing them. The flood and clearing up after it have taken up most of my mental energies over the last couple of weeks, so upcoming scenes just haven’t been able to clarify themselves yet.

It occurs to me as I write the above that some of you might be interested in how I go about creating The Ulster Cycle. I have, it has to be said, a fairly peculiar working method.

As I said before, I don’t have a script. I’ve tried writing scripts, but when I have a script I’m happy with I kind of feel “job done” and can’t motivate myself to draw it, and I’m a creative megalomaniac so I don’t trust anyone else to draw it. I also don’t pencil. For some reason my drawings lose a lot of the life and spontaneity the more preparation I put into them. Ever since I started doing life drawings in permanent marker I’ve felt my best drawings are done quickly in indelible media. I did some minicomics in this style about ten years ago and found it liberating. Having spent the last year or so trying to prepare an adaptation of The Cattle Raid of Cooley, the central story of the Ulster Cycle, and getting well and truly blocked on it, I decided to break the mental logjam in this tried and tested way.

My only concession to preparation is a grid drawn in black marker (see left), dividing the page into two, three and four tiers and columns, from which I trace the panel layout onto A4 printer paper in red biro, having given some thought to what note the page starts on, what it finishes on, how many and what size and shape of panels I’ll need to get from one to the other. Then I just start drawing, mainly still using my trusty red biro. If I’m lucky that’ll be the only tool I’ll use, but I usually also have recourse to a bit (or a lot) of Tippex. On occasion, particularly early on, I’ve used a pink highlighter pen for tone, and in one instance finished a panel in black biro because detail and depth were getting lost in red. Dialogue is roughed in as I go. It’s not unheard of, if a panel goes badly, to redraw it on another page and paste it over the original. Below is what the pages look like when they’re drawn.

Then I scan the page in RGB colour, greyscale it, and darken it by adjusting the brightness and contrast in Photoshop. Heavy biro drawing sometimes crinkles up the page and creates shadows on the scan, but these can be removed by deleting the red channel before I convert it to greyscale. The lettering is done in Photoshop using a font I made from my hand lettering using High-Logic Font Creator, and sometimes I’ll take the opportunity to redraft the dialogue.

I decided at the start not to use word balloons, but to connect the dialogue to the characters with a simple tail, like Brian Talbot did in the original version of Luther Arkwright, and Eddie Campbell often does in his autobiographical strips. It’s a stylistic thing that appeals to me for some reason. More artists should do it.

Anyway, that’s how it’s done.

Ireland, the Iron Age.

The chariot shown here and in subsequent pages is based on a design reconstructed by Robert Hurford from the remains of a chariot burial at Wetwang in Yorkshire. There are illustrations of Celtic chariots on contemporary coins, like this one:

They all have this double-arch structure on the side, and people have always assumed they were just decorative handrails or something, like in this picture:

Hurford rather ingeniously gave them a purpose – suspension. A platform is hung from the arches by rawhide straps, like so:

Which would seem to save the riders a few bumps. I first saw this reconstruction on the BBC’s Meet the Ancestors oh, ages ago, and I’m finally getting the hang of drawing it. For my next trick, the ponies that pull the thing.

Pictures shamelessly filched from Robert Hurford’s website, and this site about Celtic warriors.