Luke was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, where he also received a BA in Journalism. He has an MFA in Cartooning from the Centre for Cartoon Studies in Vermont, USA. His work has been exhibited in the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art in Manhattan, and his clients include Seven Days VT and Narratively.
To find out a little more about his work, we asked Luke the following questions:
What inspires your work?
Honestly, I just find everything really interesting. I could write and draw about anything at all. I have a notebook filled with many dozens of ideas for comics that I’ll never get time to make. Working on comics is my favourite thing in the world, so I don’t need inspiration to strike. I just get on with it.
Tell us a bit about your process
Firstly, I’ll decide what concept and themes I want the final comic to tackle, and take time to do some reading around the subject. Then I will free-write notes until I really figure out the structure of the piece.
Once this is done, and I have a basic map of the comic, I’ll write and thumbnail the comic through in one go, words and pictures together. For me, the most important part of the process is editing. I don’t worry about getting things right the first time around, because it is much more effective for me to simply correct bad decisions than to work slowly trying to get everything perfect at once.
When I have the comic fully thumbnailed, I’ll draw each page in pencil on whatever cheap paper I have, and then go back for one more edit. After this, I’ll ink the page, and add any colour if needed. I use a lightbox to work in layers, so I won’t have to erase pencils at the end. I try to work on paper as much as possible, only going to a computer as a last resort.
Finally I’ll scan everything in and clean up any mistakes I’ve made in Photoshop, and the comic is ready to go.
