Wednesday 29 January 2020

Drawing for the DCU

Twenty years ago I did some art for the DCU! No, not the DC Universe, but Digital Camera User, a magazine published by Future. 

The editor was Richard Burton, a name many of you will know from his fanzine days on Comic Media News, or his editorship of 2000AD and Sonic the Comic. By the year 2000 he'd left comics for pastures new and with his interest in technology had found himself as editor of Digital Camera User for its launch issue.
Digital cameras were relatively new back then so a magazine like this was a great read to learn more about them and to find out about Photoshop etc. Anyway, Richard was running a fun article entitled 'What Type of Digital Camera User Are You?' and commissioned me to illustrate four various types: The Volume User, The Family Album User, The Enthusiastic User, and The Die-Hard User. 
It made a nice change to draw some one-off cartoons instead of comic strips. I drew them traditionally in pen and ink and scanned them into my Mac to colour. I didn't own a computer until 1999 so these illustrations from 2000 would be some of the first digital colouring I ever did. I'm quite pleased with how they turned out. I prefer using Photoshop for colouring far more than I ever did using a brush. 

I'm guessing that most of you will have never seen these illustrations before so I thought I'd show them here, twenty years later! They appeared in Digital Camera User No.2, dated Aug/Sept 2000.

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3 comments:

Rick Cowling said...

This is cool. :-)
Has the first illustration (die hard user?) been used in later publications? It seems very familiar...
;-)

Manic Man said...

I know the magazine, I think I might have the odd issue for the cover disc..
Nice images ^_^

Lew Stringer said...

As far as I'm aware the illustrations were only used once. I hope so anyway, as I wasn't paid for further use.