You may, or may not, know that in my copious spare time I co-own (with my much better half – Sue) and run a little online toy and art supplies shop called dinkybox and while it can be hard work (preparing all the product images can get a tad tedious at times) it’s also great fun, especially when I get to do all the other graphics. Originally, we had a little white romper-suited guy as a mascot and recently I’ve been upgrading him and adding some friends. It’s a little bit like having our own toy range

The little guy buried in the snow with his tail sticking out is Elvis

I guess I should start thinking of names for the rest of them at some point.

The idea is rather like the Qee and Dunny in that they’re based off the same design and then customised a bit. There are six of them in total, one for each of the ESP Zener test cards (given away by the little icon on their forheads) and one secret variant chase! I’d like to maybe do some t-shirts at some point and I guess, in the back of my mind, I’m thinking of some little vinyl figures which is probably why I did them in a clean, airbrush-y style.

Umm, over a year? That wasn’t a very good start was it? And here I am again with another card for my son’s birthday (the big 6 this year). Of course I was also far too late in starting this, stupidly thinking that Autobot leader Optimus Prime would be an easy choice, after all he’s just boxes isn’t he?

Anyway, I only left myself a couple of evenings for this so he’s not quite as detailed as I might have done but I’m reasonably happy with how it came out. It was only once I started hunting around for reference images I realised just how many variations there are on ol’ Prime. In the end I just went with the 20th anniversary figure Cam got for Christmas (which is very nice ) and seems pretty classic. I wasn’t a big lover of the new Transformers Animated designs and the recent movie designs are just too complicated and fussy.

As for me being more productive? Well, I’ve not been completely slacking in the past year and there’s some interesting projects in the works. Let’s see if I can hit a more regular posting rate in the future.

I’ll forgive you if you haven’t come across the Cartoon Network series – Ben 10, about a boy (Ben, natch) who finds a device that allows him to transform into different aliens (cue action, fun and adventure!). I imagine it’s not really aimed at you unless you a) haven’t started secondary school yet or b) just act like you haven’t started secondary school yet (that’ll be me, then). I use the excuse that my son likes it to sneak a peek every now and again and it also seemed like a good idea for his birthday card this year. Just change the hair and eye colour, substitute his own trainers, make the alien wristband like the one he makes out of his Magnetix and tweak the name. I hope he likes it