We’re a bit excited about Mass Effect 3 coming out next month, and today Bioware released their first trailer featuring the female version of Commander Shepard. I love lady Shep so started doing a quick sketch for fun and ended up with this.

I just *really* like Mass Effect!

This is our pal Brentalfloss, singer of songs, haver of times. He performs comedy games-based songs, you might have seen his “What if [old game]… had lyrics?” videos. If you haven’t, you ought to. But why am I going on about him here? Well, over at brentalfloss.com, in among the songs, he also has an ongoing webcomic, and we did guest art for it this week. Read it here!

We all heard yesterday that Bob Holness “from” Blockbusters had died. It happens I’d only just drawn a picture of him a couple of weeks previously, having no idea he was on the way out at all. So, I shan’t pretend this was drawn as any sort of tribute or anything, but here it is anyway:

Here’s Matt Smith as the Doctor, as drawn by Dave. Continuing with the theme of posting the pencils for some of the pictures we’ve been working on for our big December project, here’s what Matt Smith looks like before being inked. As you can see, Dave decided that his  head was TOO big, to begin with and shrank it down for the finished piece.

That, everybody, is Zub. Look at him, he looks so surprised and put-out all the time. He’s the star of “Zub,” one of the first computer games Dave ever owned, made by the brothers Pickford. They have a really extensive gallery of behind the scenes stuff from the making of the game over at their Zub Archive, so anyone who remembers this little gem of a game should go and peruse it. The Pickford Brothers have all sorts of interesting things to say about who Zub was and who he should have been (he should have been “Zob,” for one), but we like him just the way he is, so that’s how we’ve tried to represent him here.

And, because we’ve been displaying these images elsewhere, here come the original pencils to give the post a sort of behind the scenesey sort of feel.

Each year for the past six, we’ve run a Christmas story over on the Something Awful forums. We’re going to be putting up some peripheral pictures here this year as the story goes on, like the original sketches & pencils, or enlarged versions of some of the pictures, etc.

To start with, here’s the star of this year’s story, a new character who has just worked out that she’s the Spirit of Christmas.

We’ve already had one Spirit of Christmas character (and you’ll be seeing more of him soon), so the difficulty was in making this one look different. We’d already put all our thoughts about what the Spirit of Christmas might look like into the previous design, this time we needed to do something as different as possible but still keeping within the same sort of design so people would recognise what they were looking at.

Here’s how I designed her. First of all, Abby drew a sketch based on what I’d said I was thinking of, which was something along the lines of “a twisty alien tree thing”. I can’t find the sketch, but I can find the sketch I drew in response, having watched Abby draw it from across the table. I’d seen just the sort of shape I was looking for not in what she’d actually drawn, but in the upside-down version I could see from where I was sitting. I drew this to show her what I meant:

And from there I drew a few different versions…

…until I got her to her final design.

Dumpy Little Robot spent Saturday at the first MCM Expo in Manchester. We weren’t quite sure what to expect, we’ve not been to the London version yet despite a good number of friends and colleagues telling us to try it out. The hall at Manchester became packed with fans pretty quickly and we were soon selling sketches and comic packs faster than at any previous show we’ve done.

Dave is now almost completely sold out of issues 1, 2 and 3 of The Demon Tomato and Abby spent the day drawing sketch commissions for lovely customers. Unfortunately one nice lady after an Optimus Prime drawing got missed during a rush. If she sees this post we would love for her to get in touch with us!

While we were too busy to look around the convention hall we felt there was a great vibe to the show. I think the vast queues we glimpsed at the entrance prove there is a huge fan base in our city for all things geeky. So please come back next year MCM, with a bit more hall space!

And here are just some of our lovely customers from the day. Thanks to everyone who came by, you were all smashing!

Just a quick post today, the portfolio has been updated with some more pages by Abby for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles magazine. And if you missed us at the Bristol show recently don’t worry! We will be at several more conventions this year selling The Demon Tomato and possibly a few other neat bits and bobs:

Manchester Expo Comic Village July 30th

Birmingham Comic Con August 27th

Thought Bubble November 19th – 20th

Hopefully we will see you then!

–Abby