My History

www.fluidfriction.com

I have been working in the comics industry for over 10 years now, directly with many of the famous local companies and in related industries doing designs for toys, games, animations and films.

Since I was young I have been a huge fan of both Western and Chinese comics and the varied art styles they produce. When young I idolised the work of Simon Bisley and dreamt of meeting him, so you can imagine how happy I was when we confirmed that he would be drawing the cover of our first book. Nowadays I most admire the work of Alex Ross and I find that my own work often tends to reflect his "painterly style". If things continue to go as well as they have been then we will have him to draw our cover not too far in the future and we will have featured both of my favourite artists.

There are many differences between Western and Chinese comic colouring styles, but I guess the most noticeable one is that Chinese comics tend to follow a "rainbow" style of colouring, using a wide selection of colours in almost all images, whereas Western colouring styles are much more varied and can be very muted and dark at times. The other major difference is that Chinese comics tend to follow a quite fixed style for both pencilling and colouring and have fairly constant subject matter (kung fu, Chinese legends/history/mythology) whereas Western comics can be about anything, though many of the popular ones lean towards superhero stories.

What I love most about this first opportunity to work on an international and somewhat Western style comic is that I am not restricted in my artwork. I can be as creative as I want and as long as the team likes it and it is within the style / requirements of our story then we can print it. The characters and images also do not follow any kind of fixed rules in their composition so can be very different in size, shape and expression. This means a lot more work and a lot more detail, but it also mean a great deal more artistic freedom and true expression and creation in the work.

More on our current project DevaShard later.