Tea N Crumpets is now thegagaman.co.uk

Howdy howdy howdy. If you follow me elsewhere such as on Twitter and my more frequently updated Tumblr page, you may of seen me talking about re-branding my website. If not basicilly I've wanted to ditch the maketeanotwar and Tea N Crumpets branding for a while and just now I did it.

I am going to kind of miss it, plus some things like my current business card still have that domain on them, but the domain is still valid for another year so it'll still be usable until it expires. One of the reasons I wanted a change is both maketeanotwar and Tea N Crumpets do not bring up the website straight away on Google. Lots of companies have made t-shirts and the like with Make Tea Not War on them that show up first and the address doesn't really mean all that much anyway, it was just something catchy.

Now I'm going with what I am best known as, simply thegagaman. While this does bring up quite a few links about Lady Gaga supposedly being a bloke plenty of my stuff shows up too.

The new home page features a new version of my logo trademark thingy that used to be mainly associated with Manga-Gaga, which I put together in Illustrator recently. I'm looking to build some new up to date pages for the site in the near future. Got quite a few interesting things coming up soon, including new animation so watch this space in the coming week or so!

Art Summary 2011

Art Summary 2011: AKA the year I finally got the hang of Illustrator and never turned back. Not quite as active of a year for art or animating as last year, but still a pretty good one and in a quite a few cases the art lead to great things, like prizes!

Note: these are placed under the months I was working on them, not when some were published some time later.

January: Started work on Next Film festival Ident, which was done and released by March. Not a lot of illustration, just the odd doodling.

February: A few illustrations, one for a collab that never happened and another a Valentines card which was also my first proper go at using Illustrator in years. was mainly working on the animation at this time.

March: Completed and released animation online. Also discovered some older animation of mine in print. Did a new Animals Packing Heat and a new bloggomic, but not much else.

April: My animation for the film festival got featured in a bunch of local newspapers! Made a big Rabbids pic for Stacey's birthday. Done a few doodles including another bloggomic.

May: The film festival was this month with quite a lot of exposure for my animation in printed form and shown at every screening! Put together a 10th anniversary picture of Manga-Gaga as a timed exclusive print and a new Animals Packing Heat for my first comic village table at MCM in London, which went pretty well and I even did a couple commissions there. Joined Tumblr at this time too, which admittedly I use a lot more than here now.

June: Had my Rabbids art printed in the official magazine, which was nice. Sonic's 20th Anniversary and Summer of Sonic were this month so I put together a series of illustrations to sell as prints for the event. Also started a favourite characters meme which I never got around to continuing.

July: Not a whole lot. Did a Darkstalkers fan art, a new bloggomic and the odd doodle.

August: Worked on and entered a Rayman origins art contest. By now had really got used to Illustrator. Took some sketches from last year and inked and coloured some of them up, including turning one into a daft GIF. Also two bloggomics.

September: Was one of the two top winners on the Rayman art contest, which got me a trip to Eurogamer and a copy of the game! Designed a new business card and made another animated GIF art.

October: Despite the next MCM Expo being on the way at the end of the month, got struck with artists block, so much so I tried to force myself out of it by asking peeps on Tumblr to suggest stuff for me to doodle. Got my flow back a bit when at the expo however which helped out for the next couple months.

November: Worked on and entered a Sonic CD art contest. Inked a few doodles from a while back and put together a Gumball fan art with Sharpie pens.

December: Was one of the 50 Europe winners from the Sonic CD contest! Did three card designs this month (just one yet to be released). Also did a dumb sonic run animation and inked some dumb xmas comic I sketched last year.

Xmas Card 2011

Seems like a good time as any to post this years Christmas card. Done in Illustrator and Photoshop, I swear I can’t live without those anymore.

Happy whatever you celebrate at this time of the year!

Dumb Santa Comic

Bloggomic - Suitcase

New bloggomic. This happens semi-regularly. No I don’t go on holiday a lot but weekends at Stacey’s require a suitcase fulla clothes and bits.

MCM Expo this coming weekend! See you there!

MCM Expo is under week away, starting this Friday! We now know where our table will be so look for us in this top-ish (or bottom-ish) corner if you’re going! We both have quite a chunk of new stuff to offer (especially Stacey) so come have a butchers! See more details about it here and of course at the official MCM website.

Eurogamer Expo 2011 - Game Impressions

We played quite a lot of the games on show at the Eurogamer Expo, or at least a majority of the ones we were interested in. A lot of the games that were getting huge queues like Skyrim and all the first person shooters were not on our interest list (that's right, boo at this man) so excluding the PSVita we didn't have to queue up much. Here's what i thought of the games I checked out.

Sonic Generations - They had both Green Hill and City Escape to try out on both PS3 and 360. I was told these were quite old builds most likely from E3 which would explain why the PS3 version still had a bit of input lag and looked a bit fuzzier than the 360 version. Still, had good fun with it, especially City Escape act 2 with the batshit truck with saws chasing after you! Of course I am a wee bit bias when it comes to Sonic games mind, at least I have been since they started getting good again last year. I don't think Stacey was all that crazy on it (as someone who mainly only played the Mega Drive and Dreamcast Sonic games) but I think that was mainly due to the input lag of the PS3 version which is understandable. Hopefully that will all be fixed by launch which according to staff already has been.

This is very much a game for Sonic fans first and foremost, I'm not sure how people who haven't played the series for years will react to it, but as far as I'm concerned it's got Mega Drive style gameplay as well as Sonic Unleashed/Colours style gameplay which while somewhat simplistic is quite the roller-coaster ride.

This is gonna be a looong post, so more after the jump.

Eurogamer Expo 2011 - Summary

So the first half of the prize I won from Ubisoft and RaymanPC occured over the weekend: the trip to Eurogamer Expo in Earl's Court, London! We already had tickets pre-ordered a while back for the Saturday so we had those tickets changed into Thursday ones so we could be there a total of three days and meet up with a friend of Stacey's who was also celebrating her Birthday!

The place was huge and luckily not as overly packed as other expos we had been to, and we had no trouble getting onto the majority of games we wanted to try out. The most popular games by far were Battlefield 3 and Skyrim; a good thing we weren't interested in those then! Boo this man, they say.

Read the rest after the jump!

A winner is me. Blimey.

Ubisoft have been rather lovely to me lately. First they printed my rabbids art in the official fan club magazine, and now this!

The above art was my entry for a contest run by the Rayman Pirate Community, which is not a website for people that burn CD-Rs of Rayman games but rather the biggest Rayman fanbase on the net. I made this quite a few weeks back but i didn't want to reveal it until the results were in which were today and what do you know..I won! I was one of two top winners, the other being a friend of ours Hanna! I gotta say I'm pretty gobsmacked!


The top prize was a trip for two to the entirety of EuroGamer Expo which is on next week from Thursday to Sunday in Earls Court in London. This includes travel and a hotel! The prize also includes a copy of Rayman Origins and a goodie bag full of bits and bobs. Cor!

This was all done in Illustrator, excluding the character colour and some of the background colouring and effects which were done in Photoshop.

The crazy background took a lot of experimentation in both Photoshop and Illustrator and I'm really pleased with the result. Would you believe it started out as being based on the Ubisoft logo! Also I finally discovered how custom brushes in Illustrator works so the line art is much more natural looking than previous attempts in the program. All in all I really enjoyed working on this piece more than anything else I've done this year so far and I think aiming for a deadline and entering it into a contest helped a lot.

Update: Full details have been sent to me by Ubisoft, we're going to be there on Friday and Saturday.

QR Codes!

Well here's something I've wanted to try out in quite some time: QR codes! I've set this one up so I can get it printed on my new business card which I will start designing sometime soon in time for the MCM Expo in October.

So anyway here they are! They both link to the same page which has links to a majority of my web links, my e-mail and other things. One is just a smaller version with a shorter URL. I have yet to get a QR code reader on my phone but friends on Twitter tested them and said they worked so there you go!