Merch

Quite a milestone post, this one. I've posted my separate dinos and stuff, but never had what I would call a 'line of merchandise' until now. I've been going to the MCM Comic Con in London's Excel Centre for 4 years now twice a year (on and off) and I started going with some short comics that I used to do about some cavemen that didn't sell too well. Gradually the dinos and other prehistoric stuff took the place of those and other random artwork over the years until now. I've got 3 epochs of time of extinct animals and a whole new 'sciencey' thing, planets! The idea for that was mostly inspired by a soft toy line called Celestial Buddies which do the same thing. However I extended it to all the spherical bodies in the solar system as well and added a lot of influence from Gustav Holst's Planets Suite.

I took these to the MCM this May and made more money than I've ever made before by an enormous margin. Don't quite know how to react!

Dinosaur Alphabet

Solar System

Holst's Solar System

Solar System in a line

I had planned to open an Etsy store with what I had left, but I pretty much sold out of everything. Guess I'll need to get more stuff printed! More on that later I suppose...look me up as my name or Mablox.

Triassic to early Jurassic

A bunch of dino drawings, not much to say about that. I started with the massospondylus in the middle and it ended up being a page with equally earlier ones. It's quite interesting (to me I suppose) to note that they have a fairly basic body plan this early on. No big crests and horns and stuff.

Clockwise from left:

Heterodontosaurus: A sort of ugly warthog-style one with weird tusks.

Liliensternus: I think some precursor to the dilophosaurus from Jurassic Park. Seems to have a similar double head crest like him.

Eoraptor: Not like an actual velociraptor style raptor, those guys won't turn up until the Cretaceous. They've named a lot of different things 'raptor'.

Coelophysis: A poster dino for the Triassic period. They've been found with their own young inside fossilized inside their stomachs...times must've got lean.

Scelidosaurus: A sort of dino pig-sheep thing. The palaeontologist from the stegosaurus lecture I went to said that stegosaurus probably evolved from this one.

Lesothosaurus: A sort of dino deer. I've thought for a while that most dinosaurs weren't all that pretty to look at, all spikes and scales. Maybe with some strange whisker/feathers as well.

Massospondylus: The one in the middle. A precursor to the big long-necked sauropods of the Jurassic. They didn't have the big elephant-like legs and long claws on their front feet.

Beyond the Surface

Here's a non-Christmassy flyer for the same theatre company I've worked for before (think it's been nearly 5 years now). It's for a production educating teens about online privacy and stuff like that. They wanted a lot of characters for it, took ages to do so many. I originally had someone based on Moira Stewart on the back, they wanted Davina McCall...can't say I'm totally pleased with it, but it took ages what with changes and stuff. Thought it should go here just because.

"I'm kind of a big deal!"

A bit of drawing here. It's been a while since a film got me interested in doing something for it. Fanart isn't someone being as 'creative' as they could, but it does have this irresistible pull. I didn't see Ant Man at the cinema, but wish I had. I absolutely loved it, best Marvel film for a while. I quite liked that it was a (no pun intended) small scale, no blasted American town with an army of cookie cutter villains. My lovely lady did the painting and the colouring.