Final Christmas Sillies

I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and New Year! We ended up spending a little too much of it having to do artwork but heck, it was fun.

These are the last main images I did for the Advent Calendar, and only Dave can really do justice to explaining the damn thing at all. It seemed to go down pretty well, with lots of jolly sorts joining in with the fun. Read Dave's post on http://demontomato.blogspot.com/ to get all the details. Although it won't quite explain the Christmas Power Rangers or robots or anything. Just, uhhh, best to just go with the flow and read the thread!

Santa Vs King-Emperor Chicken!

I am really looking forward to seeing a proper new Wallace and Gromit animation on Christmas day.

Calendar: CANDRAKE MASTER LORD

What present will tame this mighty olde beast?

Painty Painty Paint.

Well digital painting anyway. I haven't done this sort of thing in a while and now I have to do lots of it very quickly for our advent calender. I have finished this piece but I took the, ahh, characters off. I will post the final soon but I don't want to spoil the story for everyone reading along on Something Awful. :)

Nativity! Sort of.

Drawn, inked and mainly coloured by Dave. I did the shading, coloured some lineart and added the Christmassy glow! Dave is the only one who can possibly describe any of this quite mental annual Christmas event:

"The traditional Snatavity scene, showing baby SNatter in the slé where him born. People in the stable: mummy & daddy Snatter, the Herald of Christmas Noddy Holder (it isn't christmas until noddy say it's christmas), the actor Burgess Meredith with his little beard butterflies, he is the oldest grandest oldy elf in all North Pole, and Dooley, the unofficial head of the Grotto when he is old."

There you go! It all makes sense now.

Decepticon Sketches

The Advent Calender is going to be a far bigger project than I realised! But it's massive fun and I'll be posting a couple of our images here once Dave OK's it. Until then I had intended to hold back my robot scrawls a little but what the hell! I never get to draw baddies, so here's Lugnut, Megatron and Starscream.

Tom and Jerry 25

Later than expected. I have been helping Dave with his Christmas advent calender project and blimey, he's done more drawings for it than I'd realised. The first time he did this it meant a drawing every day in December. NOW it's between 5 and 10 fully inked, coloured and shaded drawings completed for every day in December. I'm giving a bit of a helping hand with the colours so he can carry on with the drawing and inking.

But for now here are my colours for Tom and Jerry 25. Pencils by Lee Carey and inks by Bambos Georgiou.

Sketch Cards

Holy moly, an update! It's been a busy few weeks and my sketchbook has been getting lonely. Extra days at the shop mixed in with colouring more Tom and Jerry. I have managed to get a little bit of personal work done but I'm still not as close as I'd like to finishing this spanking new portfolio my brain is envisioning. And Nemesis Fleethas slowed to a crawl for now. The crawl of a dead, rotting fish.

Dave has been dishing out drawings all over the place for his December project however, the productive git! I can't wait for him to post that stuff up. And though I've been stuck at work I've been making a lot of these little buisness cards to promote the blog. People like em! It's fun giving my customers something like this, and it's been a good exercise. My sketches have been growing in confidence.

Batman is the most popular. This is not even remotely surprising.



Coming later this week: Nemesis Fleet development (honestly!), more Tom and Jerry colours and, of course, some Transformers.

Election Night Catwoman

Jaime's suggestion today for my doodles, a good old fashioned Old School Catwoman! Mrowr!

Sketch week! Day number two.

Onto some suggestions from my friend Tom now. We're going old school Japanese! While I did attempt a classic Godzilla for him I had trouble finding references, so he'll be along later in the week. It's a robot themed day instead starting with Astro Boy.



I don't really know this Spectreman dude, but as soon as I Googled up some photos yesterday I knew I loved him already. He's kinda fantastic, I'm now inspired to do an Ultraman/Jet Jaguar/Spectreman-Super-Team-Up-Unite picture. Something goofy and awesome.

But will the film be any good?!

Just finished a colouring job and got my friends to start setting me little challenges again. Characters I'd not normally think about drawing. I'm also back on getting portfolio work done. So a quick one to start the week, some Watchmen inspired doodles. Since the trailer went online a few months back I have had a crazy amount of people come to my shop after the book. So whether the film comes out good or not, at least a lot of new readers have ended up picking up this classic. Grand!

Who watched Dead Set last week? I'll be having nightmares about zombies for weeks.

Exercising the colouring muscles.

Normally I would pop all things Nemesis Fleet onto nemesisfleet.com, buuut I'm putting Shay up here first to prove that I do still draw! I sketched the original during a break at work and Dave inked it up for me all snazzy. I popped some quick colours on and huzzah!



The rest of the gang have had similar makeovers. Harpok is more chavvy. Lazul is balder than ever. It's just grand! So if time allows, I'll have them all on the other blog during the weekend.

Paul Ridgon gave me some of his kickass Transformers pages to colour last week and it's been awesome fun. It's something nice to work on for my portfolio when I have some spare time. But it's very different to what I usually get to colour, hence my excitement when I got them! So I'm quite keen for feedback on this first page I've done. Does it work? Did I girly it up somehow?!

October Already?!?

This year has passed way too quickly for my liking. However I was pleased to see the latest issue of Tom and Jerry magazine is out, and it's the Halloween issue! I do love themed issues. A couple of years ago Dave and I were working on something called Zap, a videogame review magazine for young readers. Drawing the Christmas story for that was an absolute blast. Ahh, I think one of the robot characters accidentally shot Father Christmas with a heat seeking missile*. Great fun!

I will update my website with finished work but the whole thing needs an overhaul. So until I have finished removing all of the pink (what was I thinking?!) I'll be updating this place with all of my images. So here are my colours for the latest Tom and Jerry. Pencils by Lee Carey and inks by Bambos Georgiou.











*He was fine! Yeesh. As if you could kill Father Christmas with a heat seeking missile. Only the Anti-Santa can kill Santa.

Zatanna

Hellowed! Just a quickie, still trying to catch up after the convention. I've been trying to work on as much of my portfolio as possible before I get a new issue of Tom and Jerry, so like a fool I've been staying up late drawing and colouring. Paul Ridgon was kind enough to mail me some of his line art so I could work on some new samples. It's been a really fun challenge, though slow due to other commitments. Maybe I'll post some of that colouring here tomorrow, I'll check it's okay first.

So for now, I did promise a friend a while ago that I would try my hand at drawing Zatanna. I really have to ink this one and cel shade it, it came out pretty nice!



By the way, keep an eye on nemesisfleet.com for actual, real, genuine updates this weekend. No really! We've been doing a lot of work on the comic, and though I've not wanted to spoil much I have some neat new development sketches to go up.

Birmingham International Comics Show

GOSH where do we start?!

Dave Bulmer and myself went to the convention as part of the Manchester Comix Collective. Lord of our table was the ever classy Adam Cadwell, a good friend and fantastic artist. Liz Lunney and Chris Doherty also had their fantastic works on sale. It was wonderful meeting them, and honestly if you didn't pick up their work this weekend please go to their websites and BUY THEIR COMICS.

Saturday was insane and I think I ended up just exhausting myself, running around desperately trying to see everyone. There were so many great people there. We were opposite Dinkybox (lovely chaps, I adored them) and the Beep-Beep Car Company (run by former fellow Travelling Man lady and her wonderful Bristol crew). Either side of us, Reaper Comics and Matthew Craig. I kept rushing past New Think comics, you had such a cool set up displaying your books! Ninja Bunny comics, I totally never came back to buy your stuff. I am hitting your website as soon as possible! Wish, wish I'd taken more time to talk to you all.

On Saturday, after putting some buisness cards with sketches on our table, I was asked to do my first con sketch. Holy cow.



Thank you very much Sir! I was nervous doing both of these, but very happy too. It really made my weekend!





Dave and Liz!

I wish I has more photos to show but I completely messed up my camera settings and so most of my images are pretty useless. Rubbish! I'm sure Dave has been complaining wildly on his own blog.

Speaking of Dave. Buisness for comics on Saturday had been pretty poor, but Sunday! Sunday was grand all round! The great and mighty Genki Gear came round before opening times and kicked it off, nabbing themselves a copy of The Demon Tomato. But the best customer of the day award goes to this awesome girl.



KIDS READING COMICS! This is what we want! I wish we'd got your name, it was really nice talking to you. We hope to see you at future cons, still reading comics.



Will and Tom Fickling of the DFC! We spent a bit too long bothering everyone a this table. It's your own fault for all being well good. Always great to see Dave Windett, I hope you've since had a decent night's sleep. Emma Vieceli was lovely! Flip, I didn't get to chat to everyone. We got caught up chatting to Bob and Lorenzo Etherington and EVERYONE who has been to a UK con ever knows what it's like when you start talking to them.

Here are some of the DFC crew at their panel.



I just want to list off all the great people I saw. Nigel Kitching, Nigel Dobbyn, Richard Elson, everyone at Future Quake, Duncan Fegredo, Lee Garbett, Paul Ridgon, I wish I'd had more time to talk to all of you! Now I'd better go get drawing before my cynicism slams back in. No! First I need to write to you dudes before Dave recovers and steals the computer. His is away being fixed still!

Adventure Time!

Not so sketch related on my end, but I just had to spread the absolute joy that is Adventure Time! It's a fantastic short that is finally being picked up for a full series by Cartoon Network. Possibly the most Happy filled thing I had watched in ages. If you're feeling low, just watch the link provided at Cartoon Brew:

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/tv/cartoon-network-acquires-adventure-time

Just lovely!

Riddle De Dee!

So I'm still hunting for references for Tron, another challenge from my friend Ian, so skipped ahead and did the Riddler first.

Quiet week sadly! I'm just colouring Tom and Jerry 24 at the moment, so sketchbooks and Nemesis Fleet come second for now. Nearly done though, and I should get some more doodles done on my lunchbreak tomorrow.

Sketch Dumping

I have managed to keep myself drawing every day for the last few weeks, though this doesn't quite translate to "post to blog every day". It's been a good exercise, I feel like I'm speeding up and building confidence along with it. I work five days a week but have always felt that I could be producing more artwork during my time off.

Continuing my attempts at drawing female heroes: Ms Marvel.



Ms Marvel and Spidey Woman.



And a new challenge from my mate Ian, Etrigan the Demon!



Finally here's how my silly Transformers Animated poster is going so far.

Even more DC.

So in trying to keep up my daily sketching I had my mate Ian suggest some characters to doodle. Not sure I'm so successful at the evil ladies and the whole Sexy Sexy Danger aspect, is that good or bad? I just hope I'm capturing some of the personalities. Two-face was the most challenging and enjoyable character.

Poison Ivy:



Harley Quinn:



Two-Face:



I need to do some finished images of some of these characters!

DC Theme

I promised you Batman so here is some Batman and Robin. There was also some movie recently, I hear it's done alright for the character.

We saw it on Imax and it was very nice. Well okay, nice is a terrible word to use to describe this film. It's a grim thing and probably takes itself a little too seriously, but I enjoyed it a lot.



I don't usually draw many superhero characters but I've been feeling all inspired lately to try and draw some of the wimminfolk. I don't know if my skills are mighty enough to make them look badass though.



The trailer for the upcoming Wonder Woman animated film looks interesting.

Sketch Dump Time!

Apparently this new Transformers cartoon is so much fun it's made me draw regularly again. You guys can ask me to my face "Abby, dear, why this particular cartoon? Why why why? We all think it's a bit pants really. And your new collection of the toys is ever growing and starting to scare us." Well you can just shush and go over there in the LAME corner.

The designs are awesome and Derrick Wyatt is a frikkin cool character designer alright.



These are heavily referenced from screenshots. Hey you try drawing these dudes from scratch. There's all complicated bits and stuff.



Blitzwing is crazy and german. This, of course, is awesome.



Ninja Prowl is also awesome.



If you don't like Sari then you have no soul. Man I wish I'd had loads of giant robot pals when I was 8. No one would have made fun of me liking Ninja Turtles instead of My Little Ponies then.



And this is for a big picture I'm working on. I promise that tomorrow's sketch dump will be completely robot free! It'll have Batman. Yeah! I mean, BATMAN.