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:
Just a brief post, if you check the main menu above you’ll (finally!) see a brand new link for our Imaginary Gumbo minicomic, and the first webcomic Dave and I have made together and put online. Enjoy!
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.
We’re in the Savile Hall all weekend at the Thought Bubble comic convention in Leeds, selling sketches and comics. Come and say hi!
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
If you’ve got tickets for the Bristol International Comics and Small Press Expo this weekend (which is to say the 14th & 15th May 2011), make sure you come and find the Dumpy Little Robot table, because that’s where we’ll be launching the very first copies of The Demon Tomato #3. They’re brand new (so new that they only just came out of the printer at time of writing), so these are for you if you’re a fan either of comics or of clean, shiny things.
AND YOU MIGHT GET YOURS FREE, thanks to 3 FREE! We’re giving away three copies of Demon Tomato #3 at the Bristol Expo, but you’ve got to reach us quickly to get them. Here’s who we’ll be giving them away to:
1 copy goes to the first person who comes to us and mentions this whole #3FREE thing – ie whoever reading this gets there first. So be quick!
1 copy goes to the first person who buys our issue 1 & 2 pack – so whoever that is, they’ll end up with the full story so far.
And, since it’s an all-ages comic, 1 copy goes to the first child who buys anything, even if it’s just a badge.
(By the way, I’m talking about an actual child there, so around ten or under – nobody with a beard, in other words, with the exception of parents on money duty, as long as they’re obviously buying something for their kid.)
And of course the other issues will be available (although they’re running out, so get there quickly), and custom sketches of your favourite characters.
We’ll be at table #65 in the Mercure Holland hotel. Watch this, for more details:
(By the way, don’t use my masses of hair as a way of finding us, because I won’t have it any more.)
Welcome to our website! We’re still finding our way with WordPress but we now have a coherent home for our portfolio and comics.
We’ll be at the Bristol comics show on May 14th and 15th, with a table in the Small Press show. I’m pleased to say that The Demon Tomato #3 is currently with the printers and if all goes well it will be with us in time for the convention!
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