Astrofunk is here...well almost....thought I'd share my working on this, i was working on some A3 pages, and they're going well, but obviously take longer to draw the bigger the hot dang paper...anyways, I had an idea the other night for a shorter story, like an AstroFunk intro-taster teaser-thing-umy. Anyways, if your easily bored or don't think comics are awesome, then stop reading now :)

I had a very small rough 2 min idea of the pages on paper, so yesterday morning I got the 3 pages thumbnailed out on post-it notes, workin small and quick
















Then I photocopied these up to A4 size, so I can then use them as a guide for working up the pages to the next level...as you can see, there's a couple of changes made at this point, shots that don't quite work ( saved by post it notes again ) but eventually i got there ( i think by this point it's one in the morning and although I'm not yawning I know I should be :)















So that's astrofunk so far...I'm pretty pleased with that as a days spare time work.....next stage is cleaning up these pages with the final line, and getting them coloured...although when i say colour it's gonna be pretty much black and white...oh yeah, these pages may become 2+3 instead of 1+2, but whatever numbers they are I should get the finished 3 pages up real soon!

Comics Rock!

HotNewsUpdateStuff!!

Yo...no drawings for now, just an update....over at Fanboy there's now a bunch of new wallpapers up for download, all classic nintendo themed....i would recommend the NES look :)



This just in...check out this new video from talented Scottish director dude , everyone loves a bit of Rocky :) - Limber

ba-ba ba-ba ba-ba ba-ba, bappa-ba ....bap. Been getting into astrofunk bit more this week, currently working on the first 4 pages on some a3 bristo board at home, so should get those online in very near future...what i gots 4ya today is just some development work on the cover, not final yet , needs tweaked and cleaned a little, but thought i'd drop it into the blog mixer. Lemme know whats u think. Should also get some character sheets up soon. It's a weekend of drawing for me!! Adios muchachos!

rAWK! This weekend, I took some time out from beating the un-living crap out of zombies, and ventured into the big smoke of londinium, only to bump into one of me hero's - Noodle from Gorillaz! I was mesmerized as you can see, i think i was stood like that for 45 minutes :) What a gal!

bLIMEY! Halloween is past and its November already.....and i slowly edge that little bit closer to actually doing somekinda comic thingy....this is just a bunch of my recenty development sketches for astro funk, i have the first 3 pages pretty much worked out, gonna draw them up very soon hopefuly, just tryin to completely lock down the character style, which has been fun but tuff, not finished yet. But almost there... plus, pretty busy designing tshirts, trying to find a new flat, playing DeAd rISing ( u can pick up a frying pan, stick it on the cooker, let it heat up, then burn the zombies faces!! ) ...but astro funk will happen... u guys need to hassle me more about it :) - tell me i'm a lazy git, kick my ass!

http://WWW.IAMFANBOY.COM

Woo!! Thought I'd let you all know that the new Fanboy website is up and running! Two of our t-shirts are currently available to purchase, with a couple more designs coming very soon, plus there's free desktops, and a forum were trying to get up and running , so feel free to jump over there and post any sorts of gaming news.

I'll keep this site updated with when new stuff gets thrown up on Fanboy, and apologies for my crap modelling of the t-shirts :)

Mornin' all. Bit of messin about this week, not had loadsa spare time, but managed to find a spare hour or two to knock this up quickly. I finally got around to reading the orignal Philip K Dick book 'Do androids dream of Electric Sheep' , which was great, quite diferent to Blade Runner in some areas, but really enjoyable. Anyway, just some photoshop fun at the end of a workin day :)

In other news.... :) Finally updated my website with a link to this page, so the two sites are connected! ..although i havent really updated the website with any new content as such, just a lil' animated link....if u wanna see it u may have to clear your history and stuff first, firefox seems to not like it otherwise :) - www.rossburt.com

This week...i 'ave bin mostly eating.....pizza :) been a busy one at work this week, so practically no sketching dun, but did have a birthday card to do ( warning: cuteness within ) and managed to make a little bit of progress texturing my lil' robot and his walkdog. So hopefully get him finished soon and actually get some drawing done - one the train tonight to scotland again, so no excuses if i dont have anythign to show next week :)

have a gooood weekend!

October already, so that hopefully means i have a halloween party to make a costume for soon.... as for this week, been trying to fix a broken pc, funnily enough crayons weren't much use so it aint going fast....but i have salvaged afew things from my old hard drive, one of which is this Lil'robot guy and his Dog ( i'll be your dog, a boogy boogy woogy boogy ) ...eh....well, a dog that happens to be a walkman, cassette style....anyways , so i started this guy a couple of months or so ago, but never got him finished, so this here is the state he's in now...almost dun with the model, gotta unwrap all of him before i apply that smooth button :) which you can see i've dun test runs for on the heavier mesh. Should hopefuly have him textured real soon, then gonna just chuck him in some illustration stuff at first, maybe animate him eventually one day far away.....

oh, i may have to give him a skateboard or rollerblades :)

hI. Not been doing very much sketching this week - due to 2 things - 1:Lego starwars 2 still being amazing, the bounty hunter missions are swweeet, and -2: Painting the above xbox 360 faceplate for my flatmates birthday... she's a fan of my rabbit, don't worry i didn't force that design on her :) Turned out not bad, just needs a protective coat of spray varnish i reckon, but good practice for future faceplate designing, might have a go at my own one next.

Suck it up folks. Hot nutz poster action, courtesy of a rainy afternoon in Glasgow. What better to do than fiddle around in photoshop. Anyways, went through a few variations but I'm really happy with the final poster - just the actual comic to do now! :) gonna get some of that dun tonight probably.....thanks to Rowan for the mac time and help, hope this gets u all excited about the comic. If not, get the heck off my blog!!! ;)

Just been to an hour of life drawing - man i'm rusty, need to improve alot, and luckily i should manage to catch this class pretty much every week for the next month and a bit.....did a mixture of one minute and ten minute poses, prefer the one minute stuff myself....more nakedness next week then hopefully!

Odd Socks. Always a problem, but not for this little guy :)
Just a quick colour study on my lunch break worked up from the train sketches....next week maybe i'll move on from drawing bunnies...infact i imagine its gonna be starwars themed next week, lego star wars 2 has been consuming me xbox style. Sooo good. Plus check out the new links i just added, Beat 13 and Process Recess, both great sites.

This one's for Rowan. Enjoy.

Hi. So that colour bunny pic is coming, it's just about finished, just messing about with colour....in the meantime, here's a sneak peak at some upcoming new stuff. My mate and I are about to launch a website selling our tshirt designs, and the site is gonna also have free desktops and icons. So i thought i'd put up a quick preview, of some of the work in progress on my desktop ideas, plus a look at one of the first finished ones ....it's not desktop sized, you'll have to wait for the site to go online for that. We're hoping to be online in about a month, with tshirts getting printed as we speak. So the second it's online I'll make a big announcement here, and you can all buy tshirts and tell your friends to buy tshirts, and make me rich. Please :)

hI. Another weekend, another train journey....but not so much drawing this time, i spent most of it reading 'the curious incident of the dog in the night time'....really good book, would recommend it. I did however find time to squeeze in afew quick bunny sketches, with socks keeping their ears warm...as you do. Colour picture coming soon, tonight or tomorrow, based on one of the sketches.

Yo! I'm Back! ..my blog went a bit crazy there for a couple of days, and wasn't working at all, so I'm sorry if anybody was tryin to have a peek at my stuff but got jibberish or nowt. Should be back to normal now, plus i altered settings so anyone can leave comments, not just other bloggers, so let the insults commence! :)

Big thanks to Tim Holleyman and Ross Dearsley for helping me sort the blog problem crap, they both have excellent blogs which you should check out via the links on the right. Cheers!

Warning! Explicit material within! naughty word ahoy! Look away kiddies, lest u go blind. ...ok, you were warned....i promised zombie squirrels....and ..well, their almost here....but what i do have is the poster for the zombie squirrel comic i've been working on - 'NUTZ'. It was gonna be 5 pages but over the course of the train journey became 8 or 9. We'll see. Anyways, gotta pretty much all the pages figured out, couple of tweaks here and there then i'll rough them all out on post-it-notes and blow them up to near a4 for cleanup. In the meantime you have my scribble fest which is somehow gonna become this comic, man i love drawin squirrels :)

Hope u enjoy the poster! That's it for this week probably, have a good weekend folks!

oK...so zombies squirrels are coming, but will have to wait till tomorrow...until then, here's a quick colour piece based on some museum ant eater sketching, with headphones thrown in for good measure. Feel free to guess what song he's listening to , although it shouldn't be very hard....it's a quality tune. Anyways, i seem to be obsessed with animals wearing headphones, so there's another guy coming soon in a similar vein to this one. Enjoy!

MAN, what a sandwich! Chorizo, chicken, swiss
cheese, pickle, tomato, lettuce......eh, anyways, its lunchtime and i thought as i munch away i might post up some of the random tat that i scribbled whilst my ass went numb on the train to the capital of my homeland, Edinburgh! I might work up a couple of the strangethings on these pages, although the drawings seemed to drift into Pants territory quite alot, so if u dont like y-fronts then don't click on those thumbnails! :)

However, if like me u think pants rock, click away amigo!

I would just like to add, i did try to draw actually in edinburgh, but quel supris - it started to rain just as i was in the middle of sketching a couple of buskers on rose street, ...dang. Not gonna bother posting a soggy half sketch up here :)


coming next.....the rest of the train journey sketches....including....ZOOOMBIE SQUIRRELSSS!

u know u want it :)

Last thing for today promise...so, this stuff is a bunch of sketches i did a couple of weeks ago towards characters that hang about with that mutant skater picture i did last month....been writing bits of a comic for him, so just had fun doodling him and his mates...hopefully more time will be spent on these guys soon, lemme know whatchya think...

ok..must go home now dammnit...
adios! I'm gonna make like a tree and get out of here!

ps... sunday ....forbidden planet...buying comics...and what comes on the store stereo....only 'Earth Angel' :) Enchantment under the Sea-tastic! fortunatley neither of my hands started disapearing.

Ok...eh....well, on the train into lundinium on sunday ( which is a boooring hour long from chertsey ) i started to draw....started with me remembering the long armed monkey from the museum a week or two ago, and morphed into this strange guy who is all about the lovin. I like the sketch so thought i'd give it a quick half hour photoshop job, nuthin much, just somthing fun to do after a pretty tiring day at work. My eyes were practically half closed doin this, so may look at it tomorrow and think 'what the heck! ' :)

Aaah sunday afternoons.....man they suck, so what better way to get thru them than by hitting the british museum and sketching it up. I'd never been before so was pleased by 1. - the fact that it's across the road from gosh comics 2. - the hot dog vendour at the gates ( oh yeah ) and 3. - it's a really cool building, especially the main central room.
So sat there for afew hours, and got some not bad sketching , even whilst surrounded by a family of very enthusiastic chinese tourists. If your reading this , hi, and keep drawing, draw draw draw!!! :)

Anyways...loads of interesting things in there that could inspire countless weird characters, i hardly scratched the surface...i think the drawing are ok but not as good as previous museum bunch...think the fact that pens were running out left right and centre is what i'm gonna use as an excuse :)

Don't worry this weekend i won't be in any more museums, so it might be sumthing diferent next week ...will be in edinburgh, so could maybe pull out the sketchpad there, but not making an promises :)

Muuunday. Oooft. But at least the weekend was good :) Was gonna head to London zoo but it was lookin a bit grey and nobody likes a soggy sketchbook....so went down to the Natural History Museum, amazing place, beautiful building , plus the animals don't run around so much :) So the zoo will hopefully happen one day soon, but will probs return to the museum aswell, loadsa cool stuff which will hopefully inspire some wierd characters.
Enjoyed doing the drawings of the building most, coz it's something i don't practice enough, plus I tried to focus on the lighting, which i need to do a lot more.
I really like the Coendou Prehensius sketch ( drawing and learning latin ;) it turned out pretty well i think, tried to keep it with quick simple brush pen lines....then the pen kinda ran out dammint so it became a sort of grey wash thingy :)
PS - man the length of the arms on that monkey - i mean, i know monkies have long arms, but man they were loo-ooong. So he may turn into lil' character sketch :)

oK...so it looks as though these guys are gonna be characters in my first astrofunk story, which i'm currently trying to script right now, with rough page layouts kinda comin along at the same time....the skudmen started off as big fat gits as u can see, but i'm happier with them skinny i think...these guys are alot of fun to draw and i'm really enjoying writing about them...hopefully i can get cracking on this soon, i imagine it's gonna be a reasonably short story, maybe 12 pages, just to get astro funk started....then i can move onto the good zombie shit :)

Couple of quick sketchbook bits here...bottom stuff is from sketchin' at a cafe in london the other week, man the sun was meltin my scottish skin....top stuff is some quick ideas for the zombie squirrel comic thingy in my head...be warned...they are after your Nuuuuttttzzzz :) ..more to come of that i hope.

cosmo-cosmo-cosmo -COSMO CATS!
...or thunder, if u are not of the french inclination :)
Anyways... this is a bunch of sketches for a Monkian pic i was gonna work up...not sure now when it will get done, its been pushed aside for moment...maybe sometime during next few weeks...anyways, i wanna go back and see if i can get some more of the energy from original sketches into final pic, think the top left sketch has some nice flowing simple lines that are gone from blue work up...but anyways, thundercats was frickin awesome , and had a big effect on me when i was growin up, loved it. So i'm sure its not the last time one of the characters will pop up here. Would love to do a Ben-Gali pic, he was the coolest....

if yer also a fan of the cats, i would recomend checkin out the link to Cheeks blog, he has some frickin beautiful colour pics of his re-interpretation of some of the thundercats

Hoooo!

aaaallmost friday. almost :)
This guy is just a sketch to do with my astro funk comic that i thought i'd add some quick colour to. one of the ideas of the comic was to have everything in black and white except the graf / tags, - so the idea was that during the comic the main characters have to fight off a horde of zombies ( each complete with headphones and nikes ) using the only skills they have - tagging and spray painting. So the zombies end up like this, slapped with stickers and graf. Well that was the idea. I like the way this pic has ended up though, so maybe it i will push me to finish off some more of astro funk...

hOWDY. Back from the frozen north, and when not eating haggis pizza i did find time to squeeze in a few quick sketches, although mainly during long train journeys :) so thats what i've posted ...train girls....i like the idea of making those skull tights glow in the dark , and i might work up the girl with the tentacle tatoo.... the guy on the right is kinda based on my little brother , and is turning into a character for my new comic idea, so he should hopefully appear again soon....as for cake....who doesn't luv it !!!

Before i head off to ecosse for afew days of takin it easy ( sketching ahoy! ) , thought i'd make one last post for this week, 2 of the best things in life - girls and zombies! :) ..just some quick sketches from train style commuting time passing nonsense. I like the little wierd guy thrown in randomly with the girls....spose he's some kind of ant eater thing with a lovely knitted sweater. And a big heart shape on it. Aaaaaww :)

Hullo again. So I thought I'd post up the couple of Astro Funk comic pages i mentioned in earlier posts, just to show where i was with it and remind myself in moving forwards. I really enjoyed doin them, and have another 2 pages almost dun, with a couple more ontop of that roughed out...but i've decided to work on developing the style more, as seen in some of my sketches posted here, mainly coz i didnt think it looked interesting enough, plus i need a style that's slightly quicker to draw. So astro funk will hopefully return soon...unfortunatley there's another comic idea battling with it in my brain, and right now it seems to be winning :)

Extreme Squirrells!! Rawk! Squirrells...skateboard helmets.....sky high stunts....and maybe a ray gun or two thrown in to the mix :) Actually i think the idea i had was that they were delivery guys, and would traverse the city rooftops to get your sushi to you before it goes cold ;)
Might do a bit more follow up work on it soon.....

bONJOUR! Thought i'd start the week off with a few sketches of Astro Funk character development, Astro Funk being a comic idea which i may one day get out of my head and onto paper in some shape or form....i'm finally getting towards a style that i might be happy with, so hopefully one day soon you'll see finished characters on this site....i do have 2 or 3 comic pages pretty much done, but i decided the style wasn't quite right so am tryin to develop it at the moment. I may put the old pages up here for a laugh though, they were good fun. That's if i don't go and draw my zombie squirrell comic first. Dammnit, how to choose! :)

It's Friday! Woo! This bunch above are some sketches from last night, i got home from work and plonked down in front of the tv with my sketchpad....ended up doing these doodles infront of a show called Sugar Rush, great show....looks as though it might have slightly influenced one of my pictures....oh, and the show isn't about monkeys taking baths :) - The classy monkey in question is Mockchop, one of my trio of Astro Funk characters...he's gone thru a slight re design aswell, but mainly just in face/mouth area....and that's a can of tennents he's crackin' open by the way, quality scottish lager :)

No squirrels were harmed during the making of this picture, and dont worry he survives....just needs a clean pair of pants :)
Had a lot of fun doin this one, cheers for helpful feedback messirs Jacques and Ross ( no.2 ) .... i think i'm gonna have to do more with the family of squirrels, so those 3 in the background may return soon! Boring fact of the day - the skateboard design is basically a tweaked photo of my second, no wait , third skateboard deck, which i used to fall off regularly durin the art college days...i did enjoy painting the deck though....girls, robots, wierd rabbit/squirrel creatures... some things never change :)

These 3 are sketches and then the finished line for a colour piece i am currently finishing off in photoshop and should have up here in a day or two....the skinny skater character was definitly inspired by a couple of guys i was watching at an awesome skate park in Glasgow afew weeks ago, i was used to seeing skaters with baggy jeans but these guys were pullin the tricks skinny style. As for the mutant eye and arm....no idea where those came from :)

Astro-funk Dude

This guy started out as a sketch on post-its ( thank u jacques for that bad habbit ;) ....it's probably not the final design for my main male character in Astro Funk, but he's almost there, and was good fun kitting him out with all his graf tools, and i want nintendo to make me a pair of his gameboy trainers :) .. the bag is a jamie hewlett eastpak classic that i'm finding tuff to win on ebay at the mo. One day....one day....