Off on my jollies......wish you were here

Okelydokely! I'm on a 1 day countdown to my holiday cruising around the Mediteranean with family and friends. We're driving down to Southhampton in the Thundertank in the morning and boarding the Independance of the Seas in the afternoon.

I'll be carrying the usually art supplies throughout the trip including my HD camera for vids and stills. I'll have a couple of different moleskines for daily sketching, a grid moleskine and a couple of blank page large ones. If I have good wifi on the ship I'm going to try and upload any sketching I do on a nightly basis to this blog.

On with the packing.....

Ports of Call: Southampton, Gibraltar; Cannes, Florence, Rome, Cagliari, Seville, Vigo, and back to Southhampton

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First CGTweetup in Circo in Liverpool last night.

Last night was the first CGTweetup held in Circo
in the Albert Dock in Liverpool. I had a great evening and met some awesome talent including the Lee Carter (2000AD fame) and the amazing Raul Ovejero
There were plenty of 3D/2D new comers and plenty of up-coming talent. I'd like to feel that no one was left out. One of the highlights for me was Lee talking through some of his concept and comic work and explaining a little bit about his work flow. Thanks to the guys who sent in introduction videos which provided a little light entertainment at the start of the evening. If you couldn't make it or were a bit unsure if the venue was right for you then let me re-assure you that everyone was made welcome and I'm sure as the event grows that will be an on going theme, making people welcome!. I saw some great portfolios and some amazing websites on screen at the end of the night.

Ideas for the next event include having a drawing wall set up to get some of the 2D/concept and comic talent going art-crazy actually at the event. How cool would it be to win that piece of wall at the end of the night! We raffled off a Ballistic publishing book, `Character Painting 2` at the end of the evening and hopefully next time we can get a few more sponsors signing up. All in all a great night!

If you think it sounds interesting follow Anthony Filice on twitter or sign up at CGArtistDaily.

Some photos to follow soon I hope!

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T-Rawll 3D Print arrives from 3DCreation Labs

I've been sitting on my doorstep waiting for this little parcel to arrive. The amazing postman left it on his van and only brought it at 1.30pm. Typical! If it was a bill it would have been here a 7.30am!

Anyway, he's here, my very first 3D print from a 3D model and here's a few images of the little fella. I've finally got my head around Adobe Illustrator this week and I've cranked out a few more ideas for boxes and insert cards as you can see below. I've mocked up a `Flesh T-Rrawll` and I'm working on colorways for a Peak T-Rrawll, Magma Trawll, Evergreen T-Rrawll, Nautical T-Rrawll and the Nimbus T-Rrawll





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Monsters can Dance

I have had loads of great feedback about my recent Breakdancing Mummy #twitsketch and custom sculpt. So much so that after posting at the Kidrobot Forums I decided to go ahead and do more `dancing Monster` concepts in the hope that a new idea for a sculpt would crop up. Below are the results so far.

Please comment below this post and add your thoughts about which other monsters should join the elite `Monster Fame academy` and be immortalized in ink. Maybe a Riverdancing Beast from 40,000 fathoms? Or a Headbanging Predator.?












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T-Rawll heads off to the 3D Printers

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T-Rawll Toy nearing completion

I'm almost ready to send my little T-rawll model over to 3DCreation lab to get a 3D print. I'm getting happier with the model and I've made a few changes this weekend. The arms have been remade and after looking at the Yowie I have made it so I only need one arm that can be used on both sides of the model. I'm not too sure if the joint socket will work properly after it's been printed but I suppose I can either sand the peg down or build the hole up.

Here's a few shots of the model as it stands now:



I also mocked up a couple more sculpey T-rawlls






I also managed to knock up a couple of box designs.


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Woodland Yowie

Having received my Yowie blank the other day I set about working him over. I decided on a Wodland theme and decided to add roots and leaves and paint him with a bark texture. The black in awesome! He is a resin cast by Jon-Does-Doodles and if you get chance grab one from his Bigcartel shop.

One of the main reasons I bought the Yowie was that I want to do some resin casting myself and I thought it would help me to understand the process a little better if I could see a cast first hand. However, as soon as I opened the packaging I decided I needed to get right on and customise the little fella there and then.

I used a dark brown Premo Sculpey to make the roots and a bottle green to make the leaves. That way I didn't need to use the skull white undercoat as the Premo color was very close to the final color. I baked these parts off and gave them a coat of paint then followed that up with some detailed line work.


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A very eventful day or how I lost my eyebrows!

It isn't often that I sit and write about my day. Today has been a very eventful day. As you will find out as you continue into the narrative, I can't do much else tonight other than sit and type this blog with one finger on my right hand.

The plan for the day should have looked like this: school for Josh, post office for missed deliveries, gym, car wash, meet Anthony Filice for a discussion about CGTweet up, back to school, do some sculpting, a little drawing and finish building a robot with Josh. I didn't turn out that way.

I dropped the little fella off at school and got the parcels from the post office. My new arrivals were a custom Dunny destined for stripping and a cool custom resin blank called `Yowie` from Jon does doodles.

All good so far. I decided to shoot back home and pick up my wallet before heading to the car wash and onto the gym. For some reason that I'll never know I decided to skip the gym and spend an hour or so working on a custom break-dancing mummy figure I have on the go. I settled down in the studio and began mixing some epoxy resin to start piecing together the mummies legs. I finished that and set up my spray booth box outside ready to spray the Yowie blank and the base for the mummy. The wind was a little too high and paint started to go everywhere so I decided to use a galvanised bin to spay into. I put the mummy base into the bin and began spraying down into the bin. I fully coated the base and was going over for a second coat when the paint ignited and blew upwards out of the can. Luckily I wasn't fully over the can and jumped backwards. The flame hit my hand, the crease of my left arm, my neck and the side of my head. The worst area being the crease of the arm. I have no idea what caused the paint to ignite but checking the base later it seems there was some epoxy resin which may have caused some sort of reaction. I can't see any other explanation for the combustion but I know have a new outlook on the dangers of spraying models!

I called Pams Mum and got her to take me to the minor injuries clinic at the local hospital. They hurried me in and very quickly had my arm submerged in water cooling the blisters down. Within an hour I was spattered with cream and bandaged like the mummy I was creating before all this happened.

Speaking of which, here is the little bugger that has lost me half a day of work and is the reason I am now sitting here pecking away with this finger on my righthand.






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SouthernGFX Bigcartel shop now open

after long years of thinking about it I've finally opened my own online shop to sel my sculptures and sketches. I very often sell off my figures and sculpey models on ebay but I thought it was about time I had somewhere to sell from on a permenant basis. I've limited my self to 25 products at a time for now.

Take a look and if you fancy it get some original art by me!




and the address is:

http://southerngfx.bigcartel.com/products


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Some new Moleskin toy sketches

So, last week I found out why I'd been getting tired eyes and blurred vision and guess what, I need glasses! What a shock that was. I've been doing loads of close-up painting work on small custom toys and I've really struggled after doing it for an hour or so. So, I visited Specsavers with my prescription and ended up with a two pairs of spanky new Quicksilver shades.

I picked up a couple of new moleskines last week. I decided to go for the `grid` version for a change. The grids are great for keeping characters level and matching in proportion.

Heres a few of the latest sketches:

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