BICS 2010

Oh dear. I don't think we were very popular at BICS this year...



JUST KIDDING! This is what our spot actually looked like:









Hurrah! We had a fantastic time at BICS this year and Hall 2 felt just right. We had great company with us, our friend Tom joined us as part of team Dumpy Little Robot and took us down. Helped us with boxes, watched our table, found amazing food places and was his usual fantastic self. He's on Twitter as @ThermobaricTom and you should all go and say hi!

We also met up with Lydia of Genki-Gear, the best and coolest indie T-shirt business in the UK I'll have you darn well know. Check out the site. It's full of fantastic geek and anime inspired designs!

We were also lucky enough to have great company around our table. Jenna Whyte next to us with her buddy, selling some beautiful prints:



On our other side, Scott Stanford and Catherine with his novel Dorothy, The Darker Side of Oz. Again, the loveliest people:



Opposite us were Jason Cobley (DFC, Captain Winston Bulldog) and Neill Cameron (also of the DFC!). We ended up chatting about all ages comics and I left with a lovely selection of books from them both. Here's Jason and his table:



And not forgetting all the other great tables in hall 2, I sadly didn't get enough time to go around to see everyone but Jess Bradley, Josh, Louise Ho, Will Kirkby, and Nigel Dobbyn I'd like to give a shout out to. Plus of course the Etherington bros, Cinebooks and Fetishman in Hall 1 who I briefly got to visit!

We also had visits from the lovely Lizz Lunney, Den Patrick and Lew Stringer, and a whole host of friendly sorts who really seemed to enjoy our work! Dave did well with The Demon Tomato and we got a lot of good reactions to Imaginary Gumbo. I also ended up doing a lot more sketch commissions than I'd expected, here are the ones I managed to take pictures of.

Power Girl!





Simon of Legacy Comics in Halifax, long-time fan of the Gumbo idea, asked for a sketch of Gumbo. :)



On Saturday I drew Deadpool riding a pot-bellied pig. It sold pretty quickly so had to think of something funnier than a pig to follow up with:



After the reception of Deadpool on a pig/Deadpool on a tortoise, I decided to ruin Batman:



But Batman approves!!!



Awww Batman! :3



And then he was snapped up by the lovely Britt here!



Her lovely bloke Paul then wanted a sketch too. He thought Emma Frost having a nice cup of tea would be just right. I felt that the lady might also enjoy some half-coated chocolate digestive biscuits.



And a close-up:



Leather jackets, hell yea!



I don't think nice Batman would like this one. :(



And Adam here asked Dave and myself to do portraits to add to his collection:



There were some people and sketches I have probably missed, it was all a bit of a whirl but I hope everyone who came by over the weekend knows that we had a smashing time and loved meeting all of you! And if I got someone's name wrong feel free to tell me off. :)

New Methods and Imaginary Gumbo

I've been making a few changes to how I work recently, hoping to speed myself up a lot more. Inking has always been a slow hard slog for me in particular. Sadly my first attempt in drawing/inking/colouring pages for TMNT in Photoshop started far too slowly, but by the last page I realised I had produced it much faster than the first. If only those first two hadn't taken me so long to ink! Still, I feel very good about issue 18.

"But there are no turtles in this entry! What does that have to do with anything?!"

Faster means I finish my daily freelance work with enough time to get a bit of Imaginary Gumbo done every day. Hopefully, fingers crossed, we will have the first minicomic going up on www.imaginarygumbo.com in December.

For now I will be promoting the heck out of it, we'll be at BICS and Thought Bubble this year with Gumbo and Demon Tomato goodies, and lots of sneak peeks and info will end up on www.imaginarygumbo.com over the next couple of months. For now enjoy some Gumbo artwork. And a cartoony Garrus from Mass Effect for no good reason (insert calibrations joke here).

Ninja Gumbo

Hello Bank Holidayers! Sadly not a day off for me but I am taking advantage of a smidge of spare time to post some more TMNT pages and some rough ideas from my work for Imaginary Gumbo.

Surprisingly - the TMNT!

Finally an update! Some of my favourite pages from my recent work on the TMNT magazines.

More Ninja Turtles

Just a quickie as it's turned into another busy week. Some more pages from my recent TMNT work.

TMNT Power!

Here we go then, this is why I've been busy for the last few months. I've been drawing comics for a new russian Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles magazine for GeFabbri. It's been great fun, TMNT was a big craze for me when I was a kid! Each issue of the magazine has two two-page comics, one about the good guys and one about the villains. I'll get some more pages posted here next week.

I'm not sure why Bebop and Rocksteady are in the second comic as the mag seems mainly based around the newer cartoons, but who cares when you get to draw freakin' Bebop and Rocksteady!

Slightly Delayed...(Judge Dredd Colours)

Well I can at least say I've not been neglecting this blog due to laziness or lack of interest. Things have been going okay since I did my first work for 2000AD and Harrods, I have been drawing and colouring some comic strips for Ge Fabbri along with my usual colouring work on Tom and Jerry magazine. Plus I've been colouring the covers for the Scooby Doo magazine. It's been good fun if a little hectic, fitting it all in with my work at the comic shop. But I intend to update the blog at least once a week from now on with sketches and samples from my drawing and colouring work.

So I'll start with a few samples from the colouring job I did for the Megazine earlier this year. Pencils and inks by the lovely Leigh Gallagher. Of course I'm already beating myself up over the colour choices I made in this but I think of that as a good thing. It should mean the next time I get to work on a job like this I'll be better at it!









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