I’ve always had a bit of a love for Michael Marshall Smith’s work. His SF books are fantastic, and I hugely enjoyed The Straw Men, under his Crime Fiction persona of Michael Marshall. I adore his character work, though he seems to shine best when he has licence for things to get a little strange. So, I was really excited when I realised he’d donned another hat as ‘M. M. Smith’ and written a YA novel. Well, ‘Novella’ technically, but that really is just a technicality with this one.

The Strangers is a little misleading on the outside. Its short length and 11-year old protagonist could easily trick you into thinking it’s going to be superficial or simplistic, when it turns out it’s anything but. The one thing I’ve always said about MMS’s work is he writes about being drained, tired and emotionally shattered better than anyone else I can think of, and that skill is out in full force here. For all the touches of the fantastic, it’s a deeply personal and emotional book, made all the more poignant by the youth of its narrator.

The Servants tells the story of a boy named Mark, who has been forced to move from London to Brighton with his sickly mother and his new stepfather, David. Angry and frustrated, Mark finds a new perspective when he meets the old lady that lives in the flat under their house, who introduces him to the hidden world the servants had once occupied. A world that may be less confined to the past than it seems. The ghost story of the servants is intertwined with the complex relationship between Mark, David, his mother, and their own pasts, and beautifully captures the helplessness, confusion and frustration of a child who’s whole life has been upturned by things he doesn’t quite understand.

MMS captures Mark’s rage perfectly, putting the reader in an interesting position of sympathising with him while knowing things are not quite the way they might seem. As the book progresses, hints of the greater complications in his situation are carefully woven in in ways that we can pick up on even if Mark doesn’t. Childish stubbornness mixes with denial and his genuine incomprehension, and before the end I found myself feeling for Mark’s loathed stepfather as much as I did for Mark. There are points where it becomes simply heartbreaking. Like the later books of A Series of Unfortunate Events, it’s one of those rare children’s books with an overarching message of “There’s always more to what is happening than you understand.”

Alongside the real-world story, of tiny battles over diet coke and take away food, and musings over falling off skateboards, MMS also introduces us to the mysterious world of the servants. If I had one criticism on this book, it’s that I wish there’d been more time spent there. When I first finished the story I was a little dissatisfied with the glimpses of the ghostly world but on reflection, it’s used in an incredibly clever way, leading to an intensely personal and emotional little novel. What we do get is vivid and intriguing, snapshots of the inner working of a historical house and glimpses of the drama inside and above that grows into something more fantastic again.

Metaphors and clever narrative techniques aside, the prose is rich, vivid and engaging. While it’s told in 3rd person, it’s heavily influenced by Mark’s thoughts as it paints the faded glory of Brighton and the claustrophobic strangeness of the world under the stairs—evocatively tapping into the way a person’s inner thoughts can soak through all their experiences. MMS is on top form emotionally, and also keeps a spark of wit and humour going throughout that stops it ever getting too cloying. The whole thing adds up to a sad, strange but beautiful little novel that I’d recommend to anyone, not just YA readers.

You can read a sample chapter of The Servants on its Amazon page, here.

Interview Go!

MG&GL has been going pretty well so far, although the slow speed I’m able to work on it is being a little excruciating. Jack and I actually have quite a lot of story planned out for the thing that I can’t wait to get to. And in the mean time it’s been fun to draw, and an interesting challenge adapting his prose into single-page suitable scripts (when I’m much more used to working long-form.) Makes me want to break out and re-read the Nikolai Dante that much more… there’s something really special in the pacing of stuff like that series, where you have these great on going stories that also have to work in 5-page chunks so every single page has to be spot on. I don’t buy the progs, so when I read them I get the story all at once but because or the original form it’s pretty much super-condensed. You don’t see that much in mainstream comics outside of 2000ad and print versions of web comics. Unless I’m wrong, in which case give me links, people.

(Interestingly, I’m not sure FreakAngels does it. I love it, but then I also love decompressed storytelling too. Instead of cramming in a tonne into 5 pages, FA seems to just flow from one intense moment to the next, it always leaves you wanting more without that hyper distilled storytelling you get in something like Dante.)

Back to me (egolicious, mmm) and comics though, I’ve been having great fun with a series of workshops I’m doing with the lovely Andrew Barton for CYC. The deal is this: For Culture Shock festival this year, we’re making a comic. A massive comic strip, on big banners to go up in the camp-site. We’re taking the banner to schools and youth clubs and each group is adding on, continuing the story. This has been some of the most fun I’ve had in a workshop, and the banner is looking great so far. The next date is this Saturday 2-5pm at Harrogate Trax, followed by another in-school one on the 15th. The Trax one is open to anyone, so come along and join us.

In other news, the web design work I’ve been doing has been making me want to spruce this place up again… but I’m gonna give it a wait, lest we have yet another thing where I spend more time doing redesigns than actually updating the thing. Online content wise, I should hopefully be doing some more streaming in the next couple of weeks as well, for a couple of commissions and possibly for colouring a MG&GL page, if people are interested in seeing that.

Meanwhile, I’m going to leave you with some sketches and pieces I’ve been doing lately. Enjoy.

Minnie Gunn and the Gentlelady Thief

(You might recognise the seeds of this thing here…)

We’ve been having a lot of fun working on it, I hope you have as much fun reading it.

In other news, I have a whole bunch of Workshops in the pipeline, focused in North Yorkshire. Watch this space for more details.

Have a good one, shiny happy people!

I’ve skimped out on doing a ‘review of 2009′ kind of a post, due to running around like a mad thing for most of the holiday period. But there have been some awesome things over this last year.

Such as:

• Doing loads of workshops, both in art and joining the ranks of Shooting Roots. More is going on the workshop front, so watch this space.
• Getting nominated for the Society of Authors’ Educational Writers prize and tripping down to the House of Commons for the reception. I didn’t win the prize but it was an  absolute honour being shortlisted, I was up against some stunning work. Plus I got to chat to Nick Sherratt and that’s just cool.
• A lot of making new friends and reconnecting with old ones. There are some very inspiring people in my life right now.
• Got to see Shooglenifty and the Edward II reunion (twice in the latter case) which would tie for gig of the year, but I also got to Michael Marra again.
• Took some script writing classes and they’ve really sparked me up. Learned a tonne more about web design and photoshoppery. While I haven’t managed as much art or writing as I would have liked, I think I’ve been improving in what I have done.

Not bad for what has effectively been a down-time year.

Of course, there’s been some rough stuff along with the good, but most of it was beyond my control, a long time coming, or just serving as part of the spark to power some much needed arse-kicking. It’s been a weird one, but as it is the future and all, I decree 2010 to be a year of getting it together.

Last time I did a ‘this year, I resolve to…’ post, it jinxed it all so I’m not going to. But I have some fun plans and projects I can’t wait to share with you guys.

All right people, lets do this thing.

Have a good one.

(Granted, an incredibly silly story, but hey.)

It’s a pulp-parody, possibly to be a webcomic, and we’re throwing it around under the working title of “Bulletwitch Baretta and The Gentlelady Thief”. I’ve been really enjoying drawing up the characters, combining Jack’s design ideas with my own. They’re all done in brushpen and photoshop, and I’ll be covering the colouring method I used in the next part of my Masks tutorial.

No good will come of this. But oh is it fun. Enjoy.

PS: Gun-shoes are still stupid.

This lesson is going to introduce you to a tool called the quick mask. It’s kind of the middle ground selections and layer masks, and we can also use it to very quickly create a black-to-transparent lineart, something that can be incredibly useful to have.

While this isn’t too hard, I’m going to assume you have a basic knowledge of Photoshop for this (what a layer is, the painting tools and so on.) You’ll also need an lineart or a clean sketch of some kind to work with.

Meet the Quickmask

The quickmask is a tool that lets you create a mask or selection with much more precision and versatility than the lasso, marquee and wand tools, allowing you to control the mask using Photoshop’s painting tools. It’s easier to explain through using it than describing it, so we’re going to create a quick demo image so you can see how it works.

1) First, create a new document to work with. It doesn’t really matter what size, but I’ve used a 400×400 square.

Create a new image to work with.

2) Once you’ve got your canvas, grab the lasso tool (by clicking its icon in the tool bar or by hitting the L key) and draw yourself a random shape.

Mask off a shape with the lasso tool

3) Now to check out our mask. The quickmask button can be found under your foreground and background colours on the tool bar: it’s the little rectangle with a circle inside it:

The Quickmask Button

You can also access it by hitting the q key.

When in quickmask mode, you’ll be able to see your mask or selection as a transparent red film covering the areas that are not selected.

A Basic Mask

Now here is where it gets interesting. The mask is effectively a greyscale image, with the white areas being fully selected, and the red fully deselected. But it isn’t just on or off: shades in-between will be partially selected. And it’s not just there to look at—we can edit it too.

4) You can edit the mask with pretty much any painting tool Photoshop has. Grab some brushes with different hardnesses and textures and throw down some scribbles to test this out.

Painting into our mask

Use white for areas you want to be selected, and black for parts you want to mask away. You can also use blending modes like screen or multiply on your brushes if you like, just like working into any normal greyscale image.

5) Hit the quickmask button again (or press q) to get back to normal mode. You should see the ‘marching ants’ dashed lines around the rough areas of your mask. Don’t worry if it seems like your detail has been lost, it hasn’t.

Back in normal mode

Hit ⌘+h (ctrl+h on windows) to hide the marching ants. (You can bring them back by pressing it again.)

6) Now to actually use that mask for something. In this example, I’ve just thrown down a simple gradient.

Applying a gradient using the mask

You can use your mask to apply anything—painting, fills, even image adjustments and filters.

7) You don’t just have to use the brush tools to edit the mask either. Anything that can work with a greyscale image will work, including gradients, pattern fills, filters and even cut and paste.

Using a round gradient as a mask

Painting with a round gradient mask

The applications for masks are endless, from just using them to avoid painting in certain areas, to more complex uses like selectively blurring different parts of your image to different levels. The ability to use cut and paste inside quickmask mode also gives us a quick way to create a mask from a lineart, which we will be looking at in the next part of this lesson.

Oh boy.