Yesterday, in a charity shop...

I found a cuddly me!



You can tell it's me by the hat.

I've got a cool t-shirt. :)

I have a cool thing and that cool thing is a t-shirt and that t-shirt is a Grim Rabbit on and that Grim Rabbit one is in the picture below.



Aargh! No! It's a picture of me!

Oh, wait. There's one of those at the side of the post anyway... Hmm...

I hate photos of myself. I think I need a bigger hat than any of my current hats, one that I can hide under completely so I just appear as a giant hat with a pair of Converse, and maybe my stripy socks, sticking out the bottom like something out of a 1980s cartoon.

Anyway, this shirt came from the awesome people over at Tshirtprinting.net and is currently a complete one of a kind, unless you count the version that one of the cuddly bunnies I gave my mum last Christmas wears.



I made that coat thing from scratch and the t-shirt is a baby one with some extra stitching put in to make it fit. I should really have a go at making some more for my own toy bunnies sometime.

Speaking of bunnies, just look at those front teeth of mine.

Actually, come to think of it, please don't.

Robots, Lego and Hello Kitty

A little while back I did a post about the awesome things I would sell if I had a toy company. Well, I designed an ad!

Then my scanner went and then I forgot all about it, but here it is!



So, who wants to give me money to make them, huh?
They'll be awesome I'm tellin' ya.

Talking about toys, have you seen these?



How cute are they?
Mega Bloks (Yes, I know, but they're really not as bad as some people say) have been selling Hello Kitty sets for a while now. These ones go for about £2 for a figure a brick and an accessory in a blind-pack, and £4 for the slightly larger sets.

There's another one of those £4 sets with Hello Kitty wearing a chef's hat, but I can't really justify buying that one too.

Here's the background bricks, unobscured by cats.



Here are the accessories. They're all pretty nice other than the balloons. The balloons are pretty rubbish to be honest. The rest though, they're very nice, specially the cupcake and the umbrellas.



One of the nice little touches I like with the Hello Kitty sets is that pieces that could just be straight recolours have properly different schemes. Likewise, the fact that only one of the two figures in the raincoat has buttons that stand out and that one of the party hats is patterned and the other one isn't.



I'd like it if the two versions of the sailor suit were a bit more different from each other. Maybe another main colour, although I suppose blue is the obvious colour, or maybe make one of them sleeveless, or something like that. Anyway, it's a minor complaint. I still like them. : )

What's kind of odd is that whereas the Halo and Marvel blind-packs all seem to include a 2x4 brick, only three out of the five Hello Kitty ones I've got have them. One of them has a 2x2 brick to stand on and one has a 2x6 flat piece. Weird.

Also kind of weird is that all four of the bricks have text printed on the end.



I wonder what those numbers mean and whether there's similar ones on the bricks in the Halo and Marvel ones.

All in all, they're pretty funky. There are two characters other than Hello Kitty in the larger sets, her sister (Hello Kitty with the bow on the wrong side) and a sheep character of some description. I don't know what she's called.

I've seen a couple of images of what appears to be series two of the blind-packs including two of the sheep and one of the sister. Hopefully they'll actually show up in the shops soon.

Hello Kitty appears in Commander Cottontail as the ambassador for the Sanrio-Mega Bloks alliance. That isn't much of a spoiler seeing as the entire comic is based around a one off strip featuring her and the commander, which I've already posted about a bit.

Anyway, what's next?

Oh, yes. I have a friend called Pete and he's awesome. See, he knew I wanted this Lego minifigure, but couldn't really justify or afford it. A short while after I mentioned it, one turned up in the post. Brilliant.

Do you want to see what I wanted it for?
Well, I'm going to show you anyway. =P

It's a little Lego me! Complete with stripy sleeves, a Mega Bloks red umbrella and a big black hat.

And a Brick Forge acoustic guitar. Tha-wum!

Of course there's a few part that I have been buying myself on ebay, such as the torso on the figure below.



Can you guess who it is?
I hope so.

If you can't scroll down.

Further down.

Just a bit further down still.

...



If you can't work it out now then there' simply no hope for you. =P

Finally, to finish up, here's Commander Cottontail and some of his crewmates on the space station. :)



Next post on Thursday, probably. Warning, will probably contain a picture of me and not the Lego me. You have been warned.

Things, stuff and other subjects.

So, stuff. Yeah.
I should update this thing more often.

Anyway, here's a roundup of stuff I've been up to in case you don't already know.

Sketches! Sketches! Get your free sketches here!

If you've got a DA account and some free time I've got a journal up offering free sketches, ten in fact. The only condition is that you also offer to do ten free sketches. It's kinda neat. You should get me to draw you something.

I did guest comics!

Now, I've already mentioned this on the Gilbert and Grim website and on Twitter, but I'll mention it again anyway.

I recently did two guest crossover pages for the webcomic L33T starting here. One comic is a crossover with Gilbert and the Grim Rabbit and the other is a crossover with Commander Cottontail, which I'm sure will be ready to go live any week now.

I also did a guest comic for Callous Comics back in August, which I don't believe I've posted here before. Maybe I did. I'm not sure really. I might as well post it anyway, right?

Yes.

Last, but definitely not least...

I need your help!

Yes, you right there. I need your help. Yes, definitely yours.

You see, me and Jess have been working with JJ Sandee of The House of Madness, Shazram and Nismorack.com to produce an awesome kit bag for artists.



It's heavy duty, waterproof, can fit a who load of pens and pencils, as well as A4 and A5 sketchbooks, a phone and other bits and bobs, and it's made in the UK. I have one that I use myself and really, they are really good. I'm not just saying that. They really are.

So here's where you come in.

We have a Crowdfunder page for the bag to try and raise the funds to get the first full scale production run made.

Obviously, if you'd like to put some money towards it and get yourself a bag, that would be awesome, but if not you can still help, and I know you want to help because you're an awesome individual like that, by spreading the word, letting other people know that this thing exists and that we're trying to raise the money to get it produced.

Thanks in advance for being so awesome.

Next update on Tuesday: More toy robots, Lego and an awesome thing I have to show off.

Coming soon to a computer near you...

>

I'm not sure when it's going to be launching. It all depends on how long it takes me to get the rest of the parts I need, but once it launches it will be updating twice a week, every Monday and Friday. Neat, huh?








Well, I think it's neat anyway. :P

Rant About The Riots

When I set up this blog I meant to keep it entirely on the lighthearted side of things, but I’m going to vent and theorise about society, politics and the relevance of class issues when it comes to the recent riots in England.

If you don’t want to read my getting all ranty then feel free to skip this post and wait until I get a scanner working when I will show you some more of my awesome toy robot designs.

There, that’s that bit out of the way.

Firstly, some background on me. I grew up in a council house. Through most of my childhood it was me, my mum who couldn’t work anymore and either one or both of my two older half brothers living in a house mostly made out of crooked plasterboard at the edge of a council estate.

My first job, was a weekend one working in a hell hole of a hospital kitchen, my second job was working in a convenience store that probably had almost as much stock shoplifted as bought by actual paying customers. As well as those I’ve had two jobs in supermarkets, neither of which I was (or am) physically fit to do, one of them was stocking shelves between 9pm at night and 1am in the morning. I used to have to walk home at 1 in the morning because the public transport was shut down for the night and I couldn’t afford the taxi fare after midnight.

It would take me an hour to get back to my one bedroom flat over a shop. It was covered in woodchip wallpaper. The front end was Victorian I think, the back end probably added sometime in the sixties. It was like something out of a Pulp song. The front was drafty and the back end was damp and suffered from subsidence. One night when it rained heavily the guttering fell off from over my bedroom window and lodged itself in the plastic roof of the extension attached to the shop below me. It stayed stuck in that roof until long after I moved out.

I was never really vey good at most of those jobs though and combined with my health problems I probably spent more time looking for work than in work. I think it’s fair to say I have some idea about what it’s like to live in a relatively poor neighbourhood then and not to have any money.

With all this in mind I would just like to say that these riots have next to nothing to do with class or income and it’s not about job availability. There are some major social issues behind this, but it’s not the ones that people like to drag out over and over.
It’s not about the internet and social networking. Twitter and the like have made it easier for people who want to help clean up, to organise donations and to inform the police of the identities of the criminals who have been wrecking the streets.

It’s not about class or income. There have been plenty of poorer, working class people helping clean the streets up and plenty of middle class idiots involved in the looting.

There does seem to be an issue thought with three ways of thinking that have been allowed to spread through society.

1) There’s nothing wrong with looking out for myself. Why should I care what happens to strangers?

This attitude is nothing new and it’s not going to go away. It’s not the majority attitude in this country though. We give huge amounts of money to charity and we offer our time to help out when things go horribly wrong. Things like the riot clean up crews make me feel really good about people, but there is also those who simply don’t care what happens to other people and I think that is the biggest factor in what’s caused the looting and arson attacks we’ve been seeing.

2) Nothing’s going to happen to me. I can get away with it.

The elements in society who couldn’t care less about the damage they do to other people’s lives are usually kept in check by one thing; the fear of punishment.

What happens when people decide that the potential punishment is either a) pretty minor in comparison to the benefits of committing a crime (mostly in this case theft) or b) so unlikely to occur that they think the chances of them having to deal with the fallout is negligible? They don’t hold back.

When a peaceful protest in Tottenham was hijacked by rioters (peaceful protesters don’t usually have bricks with them and I doubt they were just laying about) and the police failed miserably to deal with the situation it opened the floodgates. Add that to a general feeling that the law fails to deal with criminal behaviour properly when people are caught and you’ve got every reason for them to think they are beyond punishment for their actions, that they can get away with it.

3) Breaking stuff is fun.

Out of these three, this is the one that I personally understand the least. Take a look at the following MTV advert/ident.



Apparently partying = breaking the hosts stuff and throwing it in the pool. Not angrily, not drunkenly, just because destroying stuff is fun. When I think party and drums I remember being at someone’s house (I cannot for the life of me remember who) whilst one of the local bands played a lyrically dubious version of Queen’s “We Will Rock You” in the corner of the living room. If anybody had deliberately broken something they’d probably have found themselves forcibly ejected onto the street.

I can’t find a youtube upload of it, but Kerrang! has an ident in which two people blow a whole load of (obviously not their) stuff up. Not that music channels are the only culprits of this kind of thing, but that particular example has been bugging the hell out of me. Largely, because I only watch MTV Rocks and MTV Classic, which really don’t play that kind of music. Not a fan, sorry. Anyway, MTV’s determination to shove the same ads on all their stations is a subject for another blog maybe.

Many of the looters and firebugs showed no sign of anger, no sign that they were fighting against anything. They were laughing, joking, smiling, having a good time, because destruction is apparently an acceptable way of having fun.

Combine the lack of empathy for other human beings, the confidence that they’ll get away with it and this concept that has been pushed for decades (and has arguably been growing) that destruction is fun and what do you get? You get what we’ve seen on the streets of London and across other areas.

Class and income seems to have little to do with it outside of a basic cost/benefit analysis. The risk of arrest is always the same, but the potential gains to be made from looting shift with income. Someone who earns less than £14,000 can physically carry the same amount out of a Sony electrical store as someone who earns £22,000 a year. The value of the goods that they can steal only varies as a percentage of income and that’s why the cost/benefit thing comes in.

There are many, many people who have less disposable income than many of the rioters who would never consider doing what they have done. Many who instead of taking everything they can have given everything they can.

Some people want to treat criminals as victims, victims of their circumstances. They want to help them, to the detriment of others who have grown up in those same circumstances.

Here’s an example. I won’t use names, but there are two people from my school. One of them is a chronic asthmatic and suffers various allergies, which have had a negative effect on her ability to work over time. She had to sit on a long waiting list to get a flat. It was a housing association property with no carpets and a window that you couldn’t open in case the glass fell out and of course she had to pay for prescriptions for the medication she would probably have to be on for the rest of her life.

A recovering heroin addict with a criminal record got a larger place straight away, because they needed to be kept in a safe environment to allow them to recover and to stop them from getting in a situation where they would reoffend.

These people went to the same school, lived in the same area, came from the same economic band and had the same opportunities open to them. One suffered from unavoidable medical conditions and the other caused their condition to themselves and screwed people over in the process. Who deserves more help?

This isn’t about class. This isn’t about income. This isn’t about what jobs are available in what areas. This is about individuals and this is about society as a whole. Stop giving excuses for criminals when their neighbours, their classmates, their co-workers or the people standing behind them in the job centre queue have somehow managed to restrain themselves from smashing the hell out of things, stealing from strangers and getting addicted to hard drugs.

I grew up in a family on benefits, on a council estate, at a school where the people who were expelled from the neighbouring schools fit in perfectly and I didn’t become thug. Whilst some of my fellow students did, most didn’t.

When you use class, income or opportunities as an excuse for the behaviour shown by criminals and thugs you insult every other single one of us who have dealt with queuing up in the jobcentre, living in decrepit housing and counting the pennies in the supermarket because you only have a fiver left to last the rest of the week. We didn’t go mug people/set buildings on fire/joy ride/loot shops, so why the hell should they and why should they be excused for such things?

I did a guest thing!

Callous Comics is celebrating 15 years, which is pretty awesome.

As part of the celebrations Carlo recently did me an awesome guest comic, the second one I've got from him.

Of course I drew him something as well. :)

Check it out.

If I owned a toy company...

...it would make the most awesome toy robots ever.



1) Daisy-bot - The miniature desktop vacuum bot!

Whenever Daisy-bot reaches the edge of a surface her eyes flash and she beeps at you. Daisy-bot is programmed with 32 different hygene related insults if she vacuums up too much dust and dirt in a short time.


2) Mr.Bot - The highly original bump'n'go robot.

Walks around aimlessly until he bumps into something and changes course. LED light up eyes change espression as he goes. The smoother the journey, the happier he is.

3) Radioactive Bunny-bot - Not actually radioactive.

Radioactive Bunny-bot has a light sensor in his chest. Watch as he changes direction and speed depending on light conditions. Also has an FM radio alarm clock mode that has him zip around at high speed while the radio plays at ever increasing volume.

So who wants to give me some money to get these made then?

Look what I got delivered yesterday...

I would have had these on Friday before the comic update went live, so I could post some pictures in the comment section for the comic. Unfortunately the postman delivered them to next door.

National Poetry Month Day Two

Why I'm updating this eighteen minutes into day three. Yes, it's another poem about poetry.

I'm still running in GMT,
Because otherwise I've failed you see,
I forgot,
To change a clock,
Oh, how I hate BST,

National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month and, along with some other equally mad people, I'm having a go at doing a poem a day for the whole month. Considering I don't write poetry normally, then this s just further proof that I've obviously lost my mind.

I've obviously gone a little mad,
You shouldn't worry - it's not that bad,
I'm just doing silly things,
Like writing poems that make you cringe,
(That's a half rhyme!)
And making books that might not sell,
And definitely won't sell well,
(Well, there are only two for sale)

I'm writing poems about writing poems,
What a silly, cliche thing to do,
It's almost midnight and it's all I can think of,
I said I'd do this too,

Now, this poem's structure might be strange,
But never mind, all the same,
I still managed to get one out,
Even if that's all it's about,

(I am a hack)

Gilbert and the Grim Rabbit: Ignorance is Bliss (Charity project)

That there is the cover for a new Gilbert and the Grim Rabbit book. The first Gilbert and the Grim Rabbit book in fact and there are only going to be three copies of it, one of which is staying with me. If that sounds a little bit crazy then that's because it is. Let me explain...

A while back Meg Hunt decided she wanted to do something to help out people in Japan following the recent earthquake and tsunami, so she wrote a blog post asking for people to donate are to a charity auction to raise money. I was completely up for the idea. There was only one problem though. My art isn't all that special.

I had a think about what I could do that might actually be worth people bidding on and hit the absolutely insane idea that I would make an exclusive print collection of Gilbert and Grim strips.

I'm scanning and colouring one page away from getting that project finished. One copy will go for auction to raise money for Japan, one book will go to another charity auction at some later date and the other one will be kept in a nice safe box under my desk. After that there will be no more copies of the book and none of the extra work I did for it will ever appear anywhere else.


I'll let everyone know, loudly and repeatedly, when the first one goes up for sale.

The books contents are as follows:

1 - Intro Page – Little bit of new art at the bottom, mostly me talking about why I'm doing the book and how I once slept through a hurricane.

2 - Stalked by Death - A brand new remake of the most redrawn page of the comic.

3 - Ignorance is Bliss - A brand new remake of a page from the original archive that somehow I've never got round to redoing before now.

4 - Frankenfood - Reworked version of the version in the main archive. Messed with the inks a little and then coloured it from scratch again.

5 - 2 Characters and a Couch - Another one from the original archive that I hadn't got round to redoing until now.

6 - Wibble - Partially re-inked from the version on the website. A strange hybrid between old and new. I think it works though.

7 - Grim Rabbit "Ink Drop" - A potential T-shirt design I did, now with funky abstract background.

8 - Stalked by a Demon - An old comic drawn again.

9 - Original Cover / The Hanged Man - A scrapbook style page featuring the full version of the art for my Webcomics Tarot submission and the first ever bit of cover art I did for the comic

10 - Hospital Visit - Another remake of a comic from chapter one.

11 - N. Smith - Another partially re-inked page.

12 - The Pirate - Minor tweaks only on this one.

13 - Best Viewed with Firefox - Made some changes to the inks and then coloured with a new scheme.

14 - Mordred the Cat / Grim by Jesse Justice - My image of Mordred from The Adventures of Wiglaf and Mordred as a cat as well as Grim drawn by Jesse Justice of Diablito del Ring

15 - Grim and the Vikings by oppernaR - A scene from Chapter two as interpreted by Roland van Duijn (or oppy as I normally call him) of oppernar.com, The Webcomic List and the newly started Let Me Show You My Pokemans!

16 - Mag and the Grim Rabbit - My image of Mag Flamequill from The Life of Mag Flamequill having tea with Grim.

17 - Grim by Bucky BA picture of Grim by the artist and writer of The Life of Mag Flamequill

18 - Cross Hare Cover - A slightly different version of the Cross Hare fan art I drew a while back.

19 - The Best of What's Left - My take on Future Paladin from The Best of What's Left as a Gilbert and Grim style demon.

20 - Fox TV - A minor recoloured version of the interlude comic from chapter four.

21 -Boom - Some new art featuring Gilbert and William.

22 - Delivery Day - Fully redrawn version of the comic from chapter one.

23 - White Rabbit - Slightly edited and partially recoloured version of another chapter one comic.

24 - Graveyard Grim - The poster design I posted on the site.

25 - Hippy Cat - An image of an as yet unnamed character who appeared a couple of times in chapter four. I don't think I've ever put this one online before. There's also some other stuff on that page too.

26 -Grim Rabbit by Joanne Wojtysiak - An awesome, specially produced image of Grim from the creator of Gothbunnies

27 - I wish I was a punkrocker - A brand new version of the image of Thalia that I posted on my DA page.

28 - Greatest Invention ever - A brand new version of another chapter one comic.

29 - Annoying appointment - A brand new, extra special page written just for the book.

30 - Cover re-coloured - Exactly what it says on the tin. It's the cover/title page for Gilbert and the Grim Rabbit with new colours.

31 - Toxic - A partially recoloured version of the comic from the archives.

32 - Back page credits and holiday art- A few notes and recoloured versions of one Valentine's and one Christmas piece.

How to identify a Wendy

How to identify a Wendy by ~WendyW on deviantART

Just in case you were wondering what the person rambling on here looks like.
Of course in reality my arms are the same length as each other, although one of my legs is slightly longer than the other because my spine used to be all crooked. Now it's reinforced with surgical steel.

Anyway, I drew this while I was out on Sunday and coloured in yesterday. This is exactly what I was wearing on the day I drew it and yes, those colours are pretty acurate. I sometimes dress like I'm in an old Batman comic.

The Webcomic List Awards Pt.2

So, the awards have come and gone now. Didn't I say I'd post again in a couple of days? It's been more than a couple of days, hasn't it?

Hmm...

Maybe I should have posted something here about the awards when the winners were announced, but is there really anybody who looks at this that wouldn't already know?

Probably not.

Maybe...

Who knows?

Anyhow, if you haven't seen the results then click here and have a look at the illustrated ceremony, which I think is very good this year. It helps that I didn't draw any of it this time. :P

I'll post again in a couple of days...