Sci-Fi Art Now Creator Interview: Matthew Soffe

It’s always been Matthew Soffe's dream to illustrate a strip for British weekly comic 2000AD. In the meantime, he's trying to make my mark in as many small press titles as possible and has had work published in Dogbreath issues 21 & 22 and The End is Nigh issue 4, with more coming up in Something Wicked #6, Paragon #6 and Starscape #1.

SciFi Art Now: What tools do you mainly use to create your art?

Matthew Soffe: At the moment I’m favouring the Pentel brush pen. Colours, tones & textures are added in Photoshop with a Wacom Bamboo.

SciFi Art Now: Why?

Matthew: I’ve tried digital inking but find it faster and more natural to draw things the old fashioned way.

SciFi Art Now: What inspired you to become an artist?

Matthew: I’ve dabbled with art all my life but only decided to take it seriously and make a real go of it since my mother passed away in 2009. I wanted to do something positive, and drawing gives me focus and keeps me sane.

SciFi Art Now: What was the most useful piece of advice you were given when you began learning your craft?

Matthew: Not to worry about developing ‘a style’ – just draw, and your style will develop all by itself.

SciFi Art Now: Which artists most inspire you?

Matthew: Mick McMahon, Frazer Irving, Jock, PJ Holden, Matt Timson, Ben Templesmith and Ashley Wood. I've also recently been made aware of Alfredo Alcala, and been blown away by his linework.

SciFi Art Now: What is the appeal to you of science fiction as an inspiration for some of your work?

Matthew: I think it’s a reverting-to-childhood thing, the pure escapism, the sense of wonder. As you get older that sense of wonder is harder to pin down, but Sci-fi is all about that.

SciFi Art Now: Do you have a favourite piece of work or project you have worked on?

Matthew: I’m quite proud of a strip I did for Something Wicked I did – a Victorian ghost story.

SciFi Art Now: In your career, have you had any bizarre experiences while creating your art?

Matthew: When I was at university I was really into oil painting, often with my fingers. After a visit to the Tate Gallery I stayed up all night and ended up painting a self portrait at about 4am, which was probably the only thing I created during my time there that was worth a damn. The moral: sleep deprivation can be an artist's best friend.

SciFi Art Now: What most frustrates you about being an artist?

Matthew: Not being as good as I’d like to be! Plus finding the time to do it alongside a full time job and home life.

SciFi Art Now: What keeps you going despite the hopefully occasional frustrations?

Matthew: The fact that, if you do it enough, you can see your own progress quite clearly. And the buzz when a strip or illustration is published.

SciFi Art Now: What advice would you offer to anyone starting out as an artist?

Matthew: If you decide it’s what you want, go for it and don’t be put off. Practice it, all the time – you can never draw too much. And as 2000AD artist PJ Holden once said to me – ‘the trick is to study, draw, study, draw and repeat. Forever.’

• Check out Matthew's work at mattsoffe.weebly.com; his blog at: mygrimmbrother.blogspot.com; and his DeviantArt page: mygrimmbrother.deviantart.com. The Best way for people to contact him is via mygrimmbrotherATgmail.com

Sci-Fi Art Now Interview: Paul McCaffrey

Paul McCaffrey graduated from Newcastle Polytechnic (as was) with a BA in graphic design. Since then, he's mainly worked in the area of children's educational illustration, so he's done a lot of work you'll never see for books you've never heard of. Some of this can be seen here or here.


Over the past few years, my comic strip work has appeared in Omnivistascope, Violent! and Zombies Vs Robots: Adventure. When he's not scribbling away, I make music with The Phase 4). (Also at www.last.fm/music/The+Phase+4).

SciFi Art Now: What tools do you mainly use to create your art?

Paul McCaffrey: Pen, acrylic paint, acrylic inks, a photocopier, Photoshop.

SciFi Art Now: Why?

Paul: Speed!

Paul's cover for the SF comic
magazine Omnivistascope ((Issue 6)

SciFi Art Now: What inspired you to become an artist?

Paul: Other artists - mainly comic book artists, I guess.

SciFi Art Now: What was the most useful piece of advice you were given when you began learning your craft?

Paul: You are in control of every element of your drawing - it's all your responsibility.

SciFi Art Now: Which artists most inspire you?

An illustration for an article
about War of the Worlds

Paul: There are so many! When I was a kid, the main inspirations would have been comic book artists like Jack Kirby, Jim Steranko, John Buscema, Neal Adams and Gil Kane. Later, I went on to discover Frank Frazetta, Howard Chaykin, Mike Kaluta, Berni Wrightson, and Barry Windsor-Smith!

Brian Bolland and Mike McMahon's 2000AD work left a big impression on me, too, as did that of other British artists like John Bolton and Gary Leach. H R Geiger cast a very long shadow over me for years; I was constantly trying - and failing, miserably - to replicate the feel of his paintings... very sad.

At college, I was introduced to the work of a hug umber of artists, including Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe, Francis Bacon, Norman Rockwell, Albrecht Durer, Andy Warhol, Richard Hamilton and Robert Rauschenberg. At the same time, I was bitten by the comic once more, enticed back by the likes of Bill Sienkiewicz, Jon Muth, Kent Williams and Dave McKean.

Since then, I've re-discovered Wally Wood, Will Eisner, Don Lawrence, Alex Toth, Richard Corben and Moebius - the latter two possibly my biggest influences. Enki Bilal, Paolo Serpieri, Juan Gimenez, Mike Mignola, Dave Stevens and Jose Ladronn have produced fantastic work and in mainstream illustration there just seems to be so much amazing stuff created over the past hundred or so years -- Bob Peak, Bernie Fuchs, Arthur Rackham, Reynold Brown, Anne Yvonne Gilbert, N. C. Wyeth, Ron and Gerry Embleton. As you can see, I'm just a big fanboy at heart!

Zombies versus Robots - art by Paul McCaffrey

SciFi Art Now: What is the appeal to you of science fiction as an inspiration for some of your work?

Paul: Aliens, spacemen, spaceships, heroes and villains, exotic landscapes - what's not to like?

SciFi Art Now: Do you have a favourite piece of work or project you have worked on?

Paul: For a long, long time, I wasn't really happy with anything I produced, apart from the cover for Hell Hath No Fury - a personal piece not commissioned specifically for the cover. In recent years, though, I've been a lot more satisfied - still a lot of room for improvement, though!

SciFi Art Now: What most frustrates you about being an artist?

Paul: I'm not fast enough and the stuff I produce never looks the way it does in my head.

SciFi Art Now: What keeps you going despite the hopefully occasional frustrations?

Paul: The hope that the next piece of work will be better. And faster.

SciFi Art Now: What advice would you offer to anyone starting out as an artist?

Paul: At the risk of being really bloody obvious - draw, draw draw! Don't try to emulate anyone else's style without understanding how he's arrived at it. And draw some more!

• Check out Paul's work at www.coroflot.com/paul_mccaffrey. Contact him via his web site.

Sci-Fi Art Now Creator Interview: Bill Storie - or is it Mike?

Bill Storie, also known as Mike Nicoll, has been working in the comics industry for 20 years. He's perhaps best known for his adult comics work and Ex Astris, which occasionally features in the Dan Dare-inspired comic magazine Spaceship Away.

Bill describes himsef as a "lifelong comics fan with delusions of grandeur.

"Having dipped my toes into the water over the years, treating my artwork as a paying (sometimes!!) hobby, I've finally bitten the bullet and decided to work full-time in the industry," he says. "I've been working in the legendary 'boring 9-5 job' to feed the kids and pay the rent for too many years but I never stopped having ideas and practising my art so I have a large black book full of stories, characters and concepts which I now feel ready to unleash upon an unsuspecting world...

I'm currently working on Ex Astris, Dan Dare and a high profile job which I can't name for security reasons and Alternate Earth written by the legendary John Ridgway."

SciFi Art Now: What tools do you mainly use to create your art and why?

Bill Storie: It depends on the deadline - I prefer to use a dip pen and brush with black indian ink on a hot pressed board such as CS10 but it's almost impossible to find that nowadays so I use gloss art paper, preferably over 200 gsm which gives similar results. However, the paper warps if you use too much ink which makes colouring on it pretty much impossible so I use Photoshop for that - I'm experimenting with Painter just now to get away from the same-ness of Photoshop.

The big drawback is that the ink tends to sit and dry on the surface of gloss paper rather than being absorbed so it can take a while to dry so if a job is needed quickly I'll use a Pentel brush pen and gel pen on Bristol board.

I also create CGI strips such as Ex Astris (www.exastris.co.uk) which, despite a general unwillingness to accept this medium as "proper" comic art, has been well received. The problem is that CGI is not the magic bullet that many believe it to be and it's often employed as a short-cut by people who don't know how to draw properly, who then create bad artwork which seems to be flooding the net and giving the medium a bad name. A computer programme won't turn you into an artist, comics or otherwise, overnight and if you can't draw a comic with pen and paper you won't be able to do it with CGI.

I use the pen-name of Mike Nicoll for my CGI art because I don't want to become pigeon-holed as a CGI artist instead of a "traditional" artist which is my preferred medium.

SciFi Art Now: What inspired you to become an artist?

Bill: TV21 comic and daily newspaper strips such as Garth and Jeff Hawke/Lance McLane.

SciFi Art Now: What was the most useful piece of advice you were given when you began learning your craft?

Bill: Take the work you've just done, place it in a drawer and don't look at it for a week. If, when you see it again, it still looks good then keep it! It's a great way to pick out flaws in your own work.

SciFi Art Now: Which artists most inspire you?

Bill: British artists: Mike Noble, Frank Bellamy, Ron Embleton, Syd Jordan, Alan Davis. American artists include Neal Adams, John Buscema, John Byrne, Gil Kane and Al Williamson.

SciFi Art Now: What is the appeal to you of science fiction as an inspiration for some of your work?

Bill: It's pure escapism, a release from the boredom of everyday life which allows the mind to say "what if..." and then follow that trail to wherever (and whenever!) it may lead.

SciFi Art Now: Do you have a favourite piece of work or project you have worked on?

Bill: I'm like one of those actors who hates watching himself on telly because I always see the flaws in my work but one favourite is the pencil spread printed in SciFi Art Now showing my heroine "Saffyre Blue" attacking a tentacled beastie - part of a graphic novel I'm working on at the moment. CGI-wise the sequence from Ex Astris, set up as a daily strip showing our heroes in a crash-landing.

Above: Ex Astris newspaper strip samples by Mike Nicoll

SciFi Art Now: In your career, have you had any bizarre experiences while creating your art?

Bill: The most bizzare thing was when I moved my studio from the attic, which was too cold, to taking over a corner of the bedroom and my wife didn't complain!!! Very odd!

SciFi Art Now: What most frustrates you about being an artist?

Bill: The fact that I didn't have enough self confidence to turn pro years ago - I was persuaded that the wife/kids/mortgage option was the way to go - really should have listened to myself then!!

SciFi Art Now: What keeps you going despite the hopefully occasional frustrations?

Bill: Knowing that I'm improving all the time and that each piece I create is (usually) better than the last one - and being able to sleep late if I want to.

SciFi Art Now: What advice would you offer to anyone starting out as an artist?

Bill: First, ask someone who's opinion you trust to give an honest opinion of your work. It won't be easy at first as they will want to say nice things but persevere and make them be critical. It's the best way to highlight your mistakes, but perhaps the most important thing is to never give up!

If you really love creating artwork, don't let anyone persuade you to give it up! Rejections are part of life so learn from your mistakes and don't repeat them.

• Check out more of Bill's work online at www.exastris.co.uk and http://blog.exastris.co.uk. You can contact Mike via: billstorieAThotmail.com